Fracture
by ChicChicBoom
Summary: One shots and loosely tied pieces for Kylo Ren and Rey, in no particular order - based in, around and within kissing cousin distance of canon.
1. initialize

Does it begin here?

Black rain, gray mud, red shadows.

The flames reach like fingers to the sky. The heat feels like a promise although he could not tell you of what. The corpses are everywhere, slumped in piles, scattered like toys with the most broken and beautiful at his shoulder, waiting for more orders just as black as he is. There is thunder in his heart and satisfaction in his brain and the bone-deep twist in his gut of knowing that finally, _finally_ there's no going back. That there are no words in this universe or any other that will ever, could ever make this _right_.

It feels good. He's always been torn. Ruptured. Barely holding together but this… this feels good.

He steps forward and his saber throbs, spitting sparks like blood.

Does it begin here?

Black walls, gray restraints, white cloth.

She spits defiance and fear in equal measure at his face and he's been here so many times before that he would close his eyes if he could, variations on this theme nearly beyond count. He'll break her as he's broken all the others but for the moment he's content to crouch at her feet, listening to her heart beat staccato against its cage like a bird believing itself still in flight.

He feels everything, as always. It will end, as always.

Does it begin here?

Red walls, black weapons, gold rage.

There is purpose finally. Clarity even, which is novel enough that he takes a heartbeat to swallow it down, taste it in all its simplicity. Her eyes are wide and afraid and he swallows those down too because all pain instructs. Torment expands all horizons to singularity.

She's on her knees as before he was on his and this, also, feels right. A toy, spinning on its axis, a frantic return over and over again to center. They tremble together on the cusp of the shift and he feels and he bleeds and he does as every one of his teachers believed he was too broken to ever do and he _acts_.

It ends here.

The sabacc dice melt in his hand like everything else in his life and he stares at emptiness and feels no surprise. His fingers close. The world chooses then to pulse with his hurt, as if for some reason this is a moment that could count and he's caught out of time, out of options. He looks up to find that she is looking down and he's on one knee in the wrack and ruin and this does not feel right, this does not feel right at _all_.

Black gloves, gray ramp, white pain.

It's not all his. But he feels and he feels and he _feels_ and it's still not enough, could never be enough.

He stands when she is gone and while he has broken everything he could reach both within and without and there is an ocean of salt outside cracked and bleeding like entrails, they are still not _dead_.

Pain teaches. Torment educates.

He's destroyed two masters now. Maybe this time he can make it stick.


	2. ash

He's five strides onto the flight deck when treachery flickers like ash across his eyes.

He keeps walking, covering the distance. Angry that his face is bare, that his mask is in pieces when he needs it the most _and who's fault is that_ that somehow they've lost the Supremacy beyond any hope of recovery and more than half her escort along with her _and how exactly did that happen_ and that this deck, which should be reserved for the craft of the High Command only, catastrophically isn't.

Where there should be calm, there is chaos. Where there should be efficiency, there is panic. The _Finalizer_ is taking on survivors as fast as she can and desperately struggling to hold them all as smoke and fear competes with the screaming engines. The steel floor bleeds triage in the shapes of mechanics and troopers and repair droids, scattered salvage shoved everywhere along with the men still alive enough to stagger from their mangled ships.

He growls even if the threat can't be heard, buzzing like warning in his chest as his boots strike the ground. He's furious and in three more steps it will be rage and that _will not help_. Nothing here is right, all patterns disrupted and all he has a dark mote in his eye to say it's even coming.

He grabs for the first thing he can remember because drawing his saber would feel much too good; there are already so many losses today and if he starts here he has no idea where he'll end it. Hauls himself by force of will between one step and the next into shaking, fragile stability.

Where?

In that heartbeat he does as he has always done because stable is not calm, thrusting out one gloved hand to the side and clenching it tight, yanking on the threads. The shockwave ripples out, stripping the minds of every living thing in striking radius to him.

One man, a blaster at his side, somewhere to the left and behind, finger on the trigger and lifting. There is duality for a gray moment and he feels as the other does as the weakest around him start to fall, writhing with the pressure. He stares at his own black clad shoulder, black hair, at the beautifully dark target he makes. There is sick triumph under his tongue, a flood of excitement and adrenaline that he could do it, it's right there, all he has to do is take the chance, take the shot, take the glory.

He roars with fury and lifts his hand, thrusting his would-be assassin into the air. Legs kick helplessly, the blaster fall from fingers that suddenly feel nothing and he whirls, smashing down. The man, a technician by his gray uniform, cracks like an egg on the floor.

His breath is a furnace but he holds onto the worst of it somehow. He hisses out once and then again and finally flicks his fingers, releasing the scan. Those nearby that had not already fallen drop to their knees in concentric waves as their strings are cut. Some already have their foreheads on the floor.

He turns on his heel and keeps walking.


	3. resonance

You'd think he'd be used to it.

The world narrows, brightens. Sound whispers to itself as if everything is suddenly a half step behind itself or a half step ahead and a muscle in his jaw twitches. The entire universe is turning on its edge somewhere, folding crazily to align the two disparate pieces that are him and her.

Not for the first time the thought crosses his mind as his arm continues the strike that this moment is exactly when an assassination attempt might actually succeed. The Force feels like it's much too busy doing the impossible to warn him of anything in the way of mundane dangers.

He's alone as always, half caught as reality bends and half stripped as he trains in his personal dojo because no one outside of a medical droid can be permitted to see him like this - human, flawed, covered in scars both earned and otherwise. He wonders grimly in this split heartbeat if it's solitude that's the necessary thing, the vital thing. If he was to surround himself always, would this doorway never open again? Could it be that simple?

Would he want it to be?

He sees her then in the corner of his eye but doesn't turn, finishing the pattern of forward attack against the air. He swings upwards in a vicious two handed cut, turning the momentum into a spin to arc the weight up and over his head, a one handed downward slice meant to split from shoulder to hip. He bleeds the vector onto one knee in another spin, lashing out at full extension to finish the kill. Uses the last of it to come to standing again.

The empty gray wall ahead of him has no words of wisdom. He's got nothing to say to it or to her and less time than he could wish to be here. She can watch if she wants. It's not as if he hasn't been scrutinized during training before, picked apart for every weakness, every hesitation, for holes in his defense, errors of emotion in his attack. At least he'll be spared that this time. He doubts the scavenger girl knows much more than which end of a blaster to point.

He tries to shake it off, shake all of it off as he pulls the makeshift weapon back and just breathes. His shoulders are starting to ache which is good. His left wrist is unaccountably tight which isn't and he flexes his fingers on the bar a few times to check for injury. She still says nothing although her eyes prickle on his skin so he turns and repeats the pattern back down the length of the room, keeping himself centered, faster this time. Finishes again an arm's length from the wall.

He has no idea why sometimes he is there or sometimes she is here. He neither wants nor needs these reminders, this frustrating irritation in the form of a girl he can touch across light years for reasons that can't matter anymore. Whatever it might have meant to him, could have meant to him, it has no value now.

"You don't use your saber to practice?" Small. Hesitant.

"No."

He pivots once more to face back across the practice space. She off to his left nearly against the long wall, light gray against the dark, and he tells himself not to look but of course he does. She's crosslegged on the floor, watching him with a small frown between her eyes, delicate features tight. She looks much the same as always before he drags his eyes away, dressed in the same colors, the same fabrics as if she's forever pinned to the moment he met her. She might be thinner but he tells himself that isn't his concern and keeps himself from checking again by force of will.

Peripheral vision shows the fingers of one hand start to pick nervously at opposite palm, tugging on stray threads of cloth. She taken to wrapping the ends all the way down her hands, which is new. Only the tips of her fingers peek out.

She makes a quick gesture and he's not sure she's even aware of it. "Why not? I mean, don't you want to get better?" she asks. "Not that I want you to get better, that is." She flounders and some part of him is amused even if the rest holds onto the annoyance since apparently she does want conversation after all. "You know what I mean."

"No, I don't." He tightens his grip, then spins the rod then simply because he can, listening to the whistle of displaced air. He slides into a neutral beginning stance, suddenly not sure which form he'd been working on. Tells himself that just because she's asking questions doesn't mean he has to answer. He'd offered once and had been refused. He'd offered more and had been refused again. He's not reaching out a third time.

Her sigh is nearly inaudible. "I just would have thought you'd need to practice with your actual weapon. Instead of that… whatever that is."

"You don't approve?" He looks at the dull metal in his hand, pretends to inspect it critically for flaws. Somewhat more than half his height in length, pitted in some areas, the end he's holding has been wrapped to provide a surface he can hold without ripping the skin off his hands. It's not pretty, but it doesn't have to be. "Not elegant enough?"

"It looks like you stripped it off the bottom of a junker actually."

He likes her better when she's blunt. "Close. It's a piece of duralloy support strut from a deck repair. I use it because it's heavy and I'm trying to wear myself out." So he can sleep, so he can keep breathing, so that when he leaves this room and becomes less than human again, perhaps he can keep his temper long enough that everyone currently part of the ship's complement will still be alive tomorrow. Up to and most definitely including General Hux who he needs to keep existing, driving him to be somewhere other than where the man is lest that change explosively. "The balance is close enough to work for something that isn't actually a blade."

"Maybe that's what I should do."

She folds a knee up into a loose clasp against her chest, resting her chin on it. He finds himself looking again when he meant to do no such thing.

"What, wear me out?"

Her gaze skitters over his shoulders, arms, down and then back up again as if she cannot settle on anything but if she reacts beyond that, he can't see it. Regardless she refuses to take the bait.

"No. Practice with something that isn't my saber."

He growls then because some things he's never going to be able to help. "My saber."

"Skywalker's saber. Which he tossed away," she returns coolly. "Which I picked up. Which you broke. Which I _fixed_."

"As I said."

"I am not giving it to you," she shoots back. "Even if it was your grandfather's."

"I don't expect you to because I'm going to take it. From your corpse if I have to."

Anger is never far from the surface, not with her, and he starts to move because standing here trading words is not what he came here for and maybe, maybe by the time he's done she'll be well and truly _gone_ and he can wash the taste of her voice out of his mouth. This is as close as he can get to meditation, his body is as healed as it ever gets, as combat ready as he can make it be. He grabs for power and wraps it around his hands, arms, heart and throws himself into it.

When he hits the far wall, he simply launches into a rebound coming down in an overhead strike that would split anything in his way. Back again, harder again, the metal bar in his hands flashing in a blur. He feels it deep against his spine, in his hips, momentum and torque wrenching where damage is measured by slivers of misjudgment. Muscles bunch, stretch, held together by will and magic and the fear of both that is the best teacher he's ever found.

He has no idea how many passes it takes but finally he trembles to a halt, freezing to immobility just as the tip of his makeshift weapon touches the wall. Precise placement. Implacable intent. He struggles for thought, blown nearly out of himself with the strain. Finally he lowers the weight to touch the floor and feels the shiver in his arm as he lets go of everything, runs his free hand through his sweat soaked hair.

She clears her throat behind him. "I didn't. I didn't know anyone could be that fast."

"_Why_ are you still here?" He rounds on her, free hand clenching.

She shrugs. "I don't know."

He growls because there's nothing else for it. "Go away."

"I don't want to be here either, _Lord Ren_."

He hisses his breath through his teeth at the title before catching himself on the tiniest of things. Why is her voice trembling? It's slight but it's there. He tilts his head, trying to figure it out, staring at her although she staring fixedly now somewhere just to the left of his shoulder. He stares at her posture, the stains on her knees, compares it to when she'd arrived. He runs the words she's been saying through his mind.

"You're meditating on rocks again, aren't you?"

She shifts, opening her mouth, then she scowls. "No. Grass actually."

"Grass today and rocks tomorrow then. You're trying to work with the saber and it's not going well so now you're trying to embrace your way into understanding what you're doing wrong. It doesn't work that way, you know, so don't worry about it." He halts and then suddenly has to ask. "Have you singed yourself yet?"

The startled then sour look on her face is both unexpected and priceless and his mood lightens almost unwillingly. He takes a few steps towards her without thinking about it, the bar dangling in his hand. "Bright side, little padawan. At least it looks like you still have your hair."

Her eyes flick up at his head and then away and then back again, locking on his face. Her mouth twitches as she stares up at him from the floor. "You burned half of yours at some point, didn't you."

"As if I would tell you. But yes."

The admission surprises him as much as it does her. Easy, sweet. As if they tell each other these stories. As if he should smile at the memory, as if she should tease him about when he was young enough to make those kinds of mistakes.

Before he can think of something to break this sudden resonance, the tip of her tongue touches her lip in a flash of nervous pink. She leans forward and he can all but see her grabbing for courage with both hands. "How did. How did you get better with it? Your saber. I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

"Are you asking me to teach you?" he grits out.

Her mouth opens, closes and then something flashes across her face too fast to be pinned down. She looks back down at her hands and her fingers pick savagely at the binding cloth.

"Rey." It's the first time he's said her name and it's past his lips before he can call it back. Her eyes flicker with wariness, with a startled surprise. He sighs and walks over to her to crouch on the balls of his feet, bringing himself down close to her level. She shivers, he can see it, but she doesn't move. He plants the rod on the ground and leans half his weight against it, fingers wrapping around the cool metal. "Stop it. This isn't something you have to learn."

"What? What does that even mean? That I'm never going to be as good as you are, so I should just give up?" Her eyes are mutinous but there's something else there, shifting just out of his reach. Her gaze catches on his collarbone, at the hollow of his throat and her expression darkens even more.

"No. That is not what I meant." Her scowl doesn't slip and he runs a hand through his hair again, rubbing a forearm across his eyes. He can feel the sweat trickling down his back. "Don't be stupid."

"I have to learn and I am not going to stop trying."

"Rey." This time his impatience bleeds through, tinging the air between them. "You don't have to practice with your saber. I don't. This is literally just to wear me out."

Her expression half clears but then tries to return. He's suddenly conscious that his anger is bleeding away again when he doesn't want it to, that he's moved closer to her, less than a few feet away now. He could reach out and put his fingers on her knee if he wanted. He could reach farther than that. Her eyes are searching his as if there's an answer there and suddenly there's an ache under his ribs that he doesn't want to acknowledge.

She should be here, not there, wherever there is. She should be asking him these questions because it should be the most natural thing in the world for them; at his side, learning and stretching and growing. He should be answering so that she could.

She nibbles on her lower lip without taking her gaze from his and he tries not to notice, forcing his breathing to stay even. "Fine. Okay. Let's say I believe you. How am I supposed to get better then? I can't even get through the first forms in the book no matter how I study without nearly skewering myself every three minutes, or worse, Finn when he walks in the door. Maybe you've been doing this since you were a baby but I haven't."

The mention of the traitor doesn't help but he blinks, focusing on the more important thing - Skywalker gave her a book? Skywalker _had_ a book? Useless as it would be for something like this. "Not a baby, no, but I had a saber in my hands when I was five," he says finally. "I learned most of the Jedi forms by the time I was eleven and I practiced them every day for nearly a decade." It gives him satisfaction to see her eyes widen a little at that. "And whatever else Skywalker told you about me, I was very good at that part."

"I beat you though." It's thin, but firm. His lips pull back in a grimace.

"Yes," he has to acknowledge after a grating moment. "You did. Although I was, if you remember, not at my best."

She glances down as if she can't help it. The blaster scar spreads across his lower ribs like a lover's hand, ragged and white, fingers reaching down his side as if looking for something more. Sullen anger flickers then under the weight of her eyes, under the pressure of memory, the canker of his failure. He realizes that his fingers are white knuckled on the weapon and he eases back onto his heels because just the mention of that night still makes him want to lunge forward and extract payment for it. Maybe one day he'll get it.

"Rey. You'd never held a lightsaber before, I know you hadn't. I've been training my whole life with the expectation that I would be very good at it because I wasn't allowed to be otherwise. How did you win?"

"I don't. I don't know."

"Yes, you do." He ducks his head down to stare into her eyes, willing her to understanding, not even sure anymore of his reasons why. "You know exactly. How did you win?"

She nibbles her lip again and if she doesn't stop that, he's going to need to do something about it. Her eyes unfocus and he can all but see it playing out in her mind, moving over her sharp features.

"I just. I just… knew. What to do. How to move." She exhales. "How to stop you."

"Yes. And you always will. Because I've been practicing my whole life."

"I don't understand."

"Yes you do."

"No. I don't."

His own words flung back in his face and he makes a noise of frustration because he can't help it, aggravated and angry again and tired of having to teach her, wanting to teach her when she keeps saying she wants nothing from him. He shoves abruptly forward on one foot, uncoiling hard with the metal in his hand snapping forward but she's already nearly out of range before he even finishes the motion, almost before he started. She's gotten to one knee, the other foot planted on the floor and ready to move with the sudden swirl of potential violence in the air. Her fingers are spread low, balance and reaction and her own answering storm.

"See?" he breathes, holding onto it by the skin of his teeth, tension crackling across his shoulders. He straightens to his full height, flexing fingers tight enough to ache. "Whatever Skywalker had you doing,_ stop it_. Sitting on rocks, communing with the trees, waving your saber at the birds. Sticking your head under a waterfall to find peace, whatever it was, you don't need it. You don't need _any_ of it because it's already yours. Your body knows what to do because _mine_ does."

The look in her eyes is uncertain, a wavering fear and he doesn't like it, not at all. She can't stay this ignorant, he won't permit it.

"We're that close, Rey. I was wounded, bleeding my life away both inside and out, and I was _still_ winning right up until the moment that I wasn't. You took from me what you needed because you thought you were going to die if you didn't, and you did it again just now without even thinking about it. The Force moves through you as it does through me. _Just_ as it does through me."

She's still staring at him, her eyes getting wider and wider and he has no idea what the expression on her face means and suddenly she's gone.

He throws the bar across the room.


	4. control

It's the oddest thought to have, but standing in the empty, echoing cavern of space where his master's presence was largest and deepest, he finds he mostly misses the certainty.

As if anyone could ever have accused him of being certain of anything. His entire life seems plagued by indecision and three steps one way and two steps another, and all of it a shifting spiral that would make no sense to the outside eye. He's not even sure it always makes sense to him, even as he stands in the middle and holds the web of it.

He at least knows what he wants. That hasn't changed no matter what else has.

He looks up at the high viewport that spills ancient starlight onto the dark floor and the dais above and finds himself caressing the memories that live here. They're certainly thick enough on the ground to be their own shadows at this point; pain and blood and scorched flesh, lacerated thoughts, shredded intentions. The worst of them are his but by no means all. Oh, by no means all.

Behind him the door slides open and rapid footsteps approach. The sharp sound echoes, boots as shiny as blades ringing true on the walkway. He half looks over his shoulder before turning back to the contemplation of emptiness. Alone, as he'd expected. No one ever came here except by express order and he'd counted on it, had chosen this place for it and it's nice to know he's made no errors with that at least.

When the entry closes and the light cuts off, he extends his awareness and force locks the door with a whisper. A moment later the ringing steps stop as the other reaches his shoulder. Military. Precise. Not continuing forward any more than he has, a mindful distance away from the first of the risers that lead upward to a platform that now holds nothing.

This was as close as either of them were ever permitted when his master was alive. Habit, he's noted, is hard to break. It will serve him now.

"General Hux," he acknowledges. The modulator on his new mask rumbles in the air.

"Supreme Leader."

Anger slices but he'd expected it so it passes by. A title made of nothing, floating as it is with the contempt sliding under every syllable like oil.

"Yes," he agrees. He clasps his hands behind his back, keeps his masked gaze fixed ahead which of course means that Hux must as well in case there is something there to look at. "You are wondering why I summoned you here."

"Yes, Supreme Leader." A tilted head, a lift of pale eyebrow in a polite question. "You have orders for me?"

"No. I am trying to decide whether to kill you where you stand."

It's to Hux's credit that he doesn't even flinch. He doesn't even go for the blaster at his side. "I am loyal, always, to the First Order and to you, Supreme Leader." The thin man turns to him, goes down to one knee on the black floor as he has done so many times before, his black uniform glinting in silver points. His head is bowed as is appropriate, conveniently hiding his eyes. It is perfect camouflage, not the least of which is because it's so familiar. In this place only his hair has color. "You cannot question my commitment to our glorious cause."

"I question everything."

"Lord Ren, I will not fail you."

"You will." He looks down and lets the potential in the moment swirl without resolution. The back of Hux's neck is exposed, a mere fingerlength but the pale skin is tempting in its vulnerability. "Snoke kept you because he gave you what you wanted; command of his armies and the instruction to use them as you saw fit. You aren't sure I can give you the same thing and treachery bleeds from you like smoke."

He reaches out before Hux can reply, curling his fingers. He grabs the surface of thought, freezing it in place without disturbing the layers below. He's not interested in whatever Hux has planned, has thought about planning, whatever he has probably already set in motion. He hears the man swallow, a tiny noise against the silence and he tightens the pressure, locking muscle to bone.

Kylo tilts his head, knowing what it will look like. In the audience chamber he is black on black, half consumed by shadows. The fact that the effect is intentional does not make it any less instructional.

Hux has made the first mistake by coming alone, the second by not treating this seriously enough in the opening moments. As if he expects Ren to still be under his master's thumb, that correction will lash out from a space that is uninhabited. A habit of thought that has betrayed him, the very pattern of it soaked into this room.

"You are not my equal and you never will be." He prods sharply, inflicting a splinter of pain. Considering the shrieking torture that has happened before in this exact spot, it's nothing and they both know it. A reminder only and he soothes it, a stroke of absolution to ease it away and at that Hux flinches. Better.

He starts to walk slowly around the man frozen in a position of subservience as if he's contemplating an animal for sale in the market. "You think that you can command the First Order without me and you are wrong. You think that they will be loyal to you alone and you are wrong. You think you know my weaknesses and you despise them." Anger surges in a red, sickening wave and he has to take a breath, another, to channel it. "My master punished me for every one of the failings he built into me and it pleased him to do so while you watched. You saw me ripped apart and you pitied me for it. Relieved each time that it wasn't you bleeding on this floor."

He can see the line of sweat starting, the tension in the man's shoulders as he keeps walking until he's out of Hux's peripheral vision, at his unprotected back.

"I am here to show you the error of your assumptions."

"Supreme Leader, I assure you…"

He steps forward and grabs a fistful of hair, yanking the man's head back. There's a thin whine, quickly cut off. He contemplates the exposed throat, the thin press of lips, the emanating emotions that are finally starting to slip from wariness to fear. Better.

"You assure me of _nothing_. You have failed to appreciate the teachings of the dark side. You believe in order. In technology." He steps forward, his legs flush now against Hux's back, pulling the man's head to the side to bare the pulsing carotid artery. A green eye rolls in its socket and there is a spike of sudden terror, hard and unexpected. Oh no, Hux is not liking this at all. Did he truly think himself invulnerable behind his title, his previous place, with Kylo too weak to attack it?

He tightens his grip to keep himself from doing anything worse. He still hasn't decided. "You believe in your training program, your soldiers that, as it turns out, can desert you. The things you build and the things you use. I will instruct you where your true allegiance should lie." He raises his other hand, fingers starting to flex.

"Lord Ren, if you will." The voice is a croak. "If I may speak?"

So close. He sinks deeper into the mind panicking below his twisted fingers. Almost there. "Yes."

"I swear. I swear to serve you faithfully, Supreme Leader, this is my purpose. My life's work. I believe in the First Order, the enlightenment we will bring to the galaxy. To free it of chaos, to give it the direction it needs under your guidance. I believe in all that we do. You cannot doubt me."

"I am used to doubting, General Hux." He leans down, letting his mask dominate the other man's field of vision. Almost there. "Snoke acted as if every move he made, every wish he expressed was immutable law, carefully thought out and planned for. His plans did not save him. His guards did not save him. _My presence_ did not save him. He died on his throne, struck down by a slip of a girl he thought he controlled. I am not going to make that mistake."

Hux closes his eyes and his adam's apple bobs. "Ren. Please. _Please_." He doesn't want to beg, not even for his life and the shame and fury of it spreads like a stain, rippling outwards.

Kylo takes it and _shoves_, pushing the terror and humiliation as far down as he can into the mind below him, forcing it into compliance. Hux stiffens under the psychic assault, near choking in reaction. His back tries to arch, pushing himself backwards only to be stopped hard against Ren's body.

It's nearly beautiful, this moment.

Finally, with reluctance, Kylo unknots his fingers from their grip in the man's hair. Strokes it instead. Hux stares up, his eyes so wide there is only white around them.

"I am not going to bribe you, as Snoke did. I have no intention of catering to you. You will serve because you want to, because your ambition will accept no lesser place and you will serve _me_ because you have no choice." He keeps his voice flat, letting the rumble of it spread out into darkness. "I will bend your mind, shape your flesh, carve your bones to the very marrow and you will fear me more than you feared even your father because I'll do it with no plan in mind at all. I am outside of your precious _order_."

"Supreme Leader."

"You think you know me. You know only what I can do with a master riding my will." He strokes that bright hair again, sliding against the mind below it.

"I _swear_, Lord Ren."

"You will serve. Because if you are not very, very careful, you are going to be the first to find out exactly what I am capable of without a leash."

There is a fervency rising in the other man's eyes, a sheen that could be tears, could be something else entirely. He inspects the damage he has caused. It's brutal. It could work. He leans in even closer, mask nearly brushing the upturned face.

"The chaos you have despised in me is what will bring us victory. Do we understand each other?"

"Yes. _Yes_, Supreme Leader."

There is no oil under the words now. It isn't exactly respect yet either, but it could be close enough to suit and the rest can come. Hux's head is resting against his thigh and he can feel the gasping breaths the General is trying to take.

Is this certainty? Does he trust in this? He cannot fight Hux for every step they take going forward and the urge to do violent harm is always so very close to his heart. Snoke's way.

But Snoke is dead.

"Then today you can live."

He lets go of his hold and steps back to let the other man collapse to the ground.

"I have recalled the Knights of Ren. See to it that their quarters are ready."

He turns and walks away before he can second guess this decision, as he second guesses all the others.


	5. push

The cloth walls do nothing to cut the cacophony and Rey has had to shuffle closer than she wants get to make sure her translator picks up everything. The smell of the creature's skin is a horrible mix of burnt oil, the sickly sweet fried dalaba fruit that is so popular here and something that might have died a generation ago but is still trying to crawl around. She keeps swallowing and hopes desperately that if her own hastily eaten rations makes a reappearance that it will be perceived as a compliment.

The smell might even be part of the goods on display for all she knows. Vision narrows for a second and she jerk herself back a little, her ears ringing. Probably not a good idea to faint in the thing's shop.

"Too cheap, waste of breath that is not yours," the being chitters at her, three eyes narrowed across the plascrete containers that have been stacked to make a rude counter. Its single antenna - is that an antennae or some kind of lure? - bobs in the non-existent breeze as if in emphasis. "More value than you carry in birthing pouch, go throw your cubes on the ground where is that is not here. Waste of water." The lure-thing jerks upwards in what might be dismissal, encouragement to keep haggling or even a signal to mate for all she knows.

Rey clutches the third rate translator module she's using even tighter but it doesn't spit anything more encouraging at her. At least it works, even if all she's getting is the sinking feeling that what she's been authorized to use out of their remaining funds isn't going to be anywhere enough for the fuel they need. This is the fourth merchant she's approached and he's even less willing to deal than the others. She's running out of time.

"That's extortion and you know it. I need at least a half kiloton and I'll pay you upfront in hard credit chip. You throw in the delivery because you want your mother to like you."

It's only mid afternoon to her but nearing local midnight here and the thrust from ship day to planet night is messing with her head. The harsh lights from the spaceport a half klick away are bright enough to keep the worst of the thieves out of the main areas in this shanty market but she's not stupid enough to trust her luck farther into the shadows. Its limited her options.

She's been at this for too long but she can't go back without something to show for it, she just can't. Her translator chitters her latest offering and she leans in closer, holding her breath to keep the stench at bay. "I can always find somebody else more reasonable, you know, and all those beautiful credits will go to someone else. You don't want that now, do you?"

The thing booms something back and a few seconds later she gets the relay. "Sold mothers after I cracked egg second time. I sell full only, kilo topped and you pay proper. Credit okay. Delivery at second sun, no sooner." The bobble on its head waggles and she finds she's tracing it with her eyes. Maybe it is a lure. She drags her eyes away and leans on her staff with both hands as if she's considering it.

"A full kilo then, credits only when my ship is fueled and ready to lift, delivery in the next hour."

Afterwards she blames it on the fact they've been on half rations for weeks, that she'd thought the odd distortions were because of hunger, the overwhelmingly foreign smell of the crowd, the food, the very ground, the lassitude that comes from being stretched too thin for too long.

"You know he's cheating you. Why are you letting him get away with it?"

Dark, sweet like spice. It rolls over her skin and she closes her eyes in sudden panic. When did he get here? How did she _not notice?_

She swallows and risks a glance over her shoulder. Three long steps away he's in full regalia, cowl over his head but for some reason his mask is still in his hand. His entire face is in shadow but wherever he is, the lights catch stray glitter in his eyes. He seems relaxed, bored even as he watches with his head tilted to the side as if curious. Her mouth goes dry and her throat tries to close.

The Supreme Leader of the First Order is _here_, watching her trying to get them all a little farther away from his vendetta. No doubt grading her efforts.

She turns back to the merchant, feeling his black gaze boring through the back of her skull.

"Is it a deal?" she pushes desperately.

"Make him give you two kilos. That bucket of bolts eats fuel like you drink water."

The translator spits again. "Next hour impossible. First sun and you pay now, twenty percent for rush rush smuggler fuel and you go back to stars, waste all breath you want."

Her frustration spikes with agitation; at the need to get this deal done, any deal done, because the truth is they're nearly out of spendable credits and docking fees are by the hour in this rat bitten sand forsaken place and it's racking up every single minute she stands here. Leia has been calling in decades-old favors for days, scrambling to get her aristocratic hands on more in time to actually do them some good. She doesn't _have_ another twenty percent to give and she wouldn't even if she had it.

But they also have to get out of here. It's now gone from urgent to imperative.

She hears him move closer which isn't helping her concentration, not with the lift of the fine hair on the back of her neck that is part atavistic fear of things moving just out of sight but also part tremble of simple awareness. She doesn't look. She won't look.

Dark hair and darker eyes and his voice that is so calm until the moment it's not.

Kylo. _Ben_.

She takes a breath, straightening with nervous tension, knowing that it gives her away but unable to help it. Tells herself to ignore the warmth starting to radiate at her back, the bulk of his body stepping up to dwarf hers with a rustle of dark fabric that only she can hear. She can take care of herself and she can take care of this. She's not anyone's easy meal.

And suddenly he's at her shoulder, leaning down. He's dropped his hood and his cheek hovers near hers, a bare whisper from touching. He's looking ahead the same as she is, as if they're in this together.

"You can make him give whatever you need. Go on. Convince him. Push."

She freezes, fingers clenched on her staff and she has no idea how that looks. Her eyes are too wide, she knows they are and for that second she is helpless to what she feels. So close. Too karking close.

The stupid, frightening, insane urge to shift back the half step it would take, to touch. He's _right there_. She could turn, fist a hand in his clothing, pull him in. Kiss him if she wanted.

Rip him from wherever he is into this reality, this moment. He'd be _here_.

His mouth starts to move near her temple, near nuzzling her hair as if he's thinking the same thing.

"Even the Jedi bow to necessity," he breathes, barely loud enough to be heard over the clatter of the market, the press of business shifting outside this dirty little stall. "Ask for three."

The antennae in her locked vision wobbles from side to side and she has no idea what it means when the two outer eyes close entirely, leaving only the central one to stare at her. "Twenty _five_ percent, or get out of way. Agree, no agree, I have other eggs to hatch."

She digs her fingers into her staff as if it's the only stable thing in the world and a wave of despair at all the things that are out of her control washes up from nowhere. It's not fair, it's never been fair. It will never be fair. The entire galaxy over, every junk market, every back alley in every city on every world, there is always Unkar Plutt looking at her through the bars, holding things out of reach, charging more each time and giving less and less.

Yet Kylo Ren stands at her back now; the crushing weight of the entire First Order stretching behind him, lightyear wings of blackness and she stares across dust and dirt and distance at this grasping backworld creature who thinks it can drive her to her knees, because from where it stands it must seem pitifully obvious that she has no other choices.

"Three kilos," she breathes out. "To be delivered in one hour. Half credits will be paid when the ship is ready to lift."

The beaten little machine in her hand has no time to cough out anything at all before this world's junk boss is answering her back. A heartbeat later, the translator crackles. "Three kilos, one hour. Half credits paid then, yes, yes. Agreed."

She exhales and it's only then as the seconds tick past that she realizes what she's just done, just what he told her to do. Her mind stutters with a weird sort of horror and then stops entirely because she didn't mean to do that, she didn't intend that at all. She was just… she didn't mean it.

But she's rolled its mind, that simply, that quickly. Just because she needed what he had, desperate to have it and get away from here, tired of waiting for something that will never come. Because he whispered in her ear and he smells of smoke and honey and everything she never thought she'd ever want.

She stands near paralyzed with just how easy it was.

She can all but taste his satisfaction, dark and pleased. His breath tickles her ear. "Try not to explode my father's ship."

And he's gone.


	6. anticipate

They arrive within the same hour.

It's nearly poetic, in a way. It might even be coincidence but he doubts it. Not that he thought any of them had actually arranged to follow each other in so closely, but the Knights are what they are as he is what he is and the closer they are to him and to each other, the more coincidence ties itself up into a frenzied knot of chance and inevitability.

Still, having them arrive nearly as one brings him a satisfaction so deep as to be nearly sexual. A single boot on the flight deck, stepping off a lowered gangway and he can feel the shudder of it run through the ship. Ten minutes later, another. Five minutes after that, the third.

He breathes, flexing his hands helplessly, palms down as if to soak up the vibrations that only he can feel as the ship welcomes them home.

Hux is probably having an apoplectic fit on the bridge. The logistics of having such high value targets in proximity to each other with the not unreasonable fear that they might turn on each other and there'll be a bloodbath, that they might instead wreak havoc throughout the ship without warning, that Kylo might in fact be intending to bring them to the High Command itself and start a purge can't be sitting well with the man. The fact that he's forbidden to interfere with them, that the Knights are completely out of his chain of command will be driving the red headed fanatic to his mental limits.

The knowledge brings Kylo a completely different kind of pleasure. He likes it, he's long ago decided, when Hux is shoved out of his rigid, pragmatic blinders and has to come face to face with the fact that the universe does in fact operate under rules he can't see, can't touch and will never understand. The General is as force sensitive as a rock, perhaps even less aware than that, but having these particular assassins loose on his prize flag ship and out of his control will be shivering up his ramrod spine as if he was.

He half closes his eyes and listens as they walk through the corridors, disturbing everything in their wake. Fear from the troopers as they pass. The force itself rippling like unseen water around them. Grid fluctuations, flickering lights, the disruptions of the mechanical systems under their feet because apparently none of them are interested in doing things by half measures this time. They want him to know.

The fourth touches down on the deck. The fifth starts their approach and Kylo shakes himself awake.

This is the part where he has no idea how things will be in the next hour. He might be dead. They might be. Maybe everybody ends up in the tender care of the medical droids and Hux finally gets what he longs for in the the dead of night when he shakes his whipcord frame awake from dreams he fears Kylo will overhear.

Still, hearing them all so close, _feeling_ them all just heartbeats away now instead of separated by lightyears and Snoke's endless caution brings back a rush of something he can't really name. They were there. They were there at the beginning when he grabbed for who he was meant to be for the first time and brought his old life down in flame and ruin and death.

They're the only ones that remember it like he does.

But it's only when the sixth one lands and steps onto the flight deck that he puts his mask on and goes to meet them.


	7. maelstrom

He's oddly relieved to see that Hux has actually made reasonable arrangements for this. Perhaps he is going to have to revise his operational opinion of his right hand fanatic.

His stride eats up distance. Kylo has always been restless, his height and length lending him impetus that is hard for other men to match, but even still he's moving swiftly enough to frighten most of the trooper squads he passes. Some are able move out of his way in lockstep, turning heads in acknowledgement; some flatten themselves against the walls when they see him coming, forearms to chest in hasty salute. Once he turns a corner nearly on top of a squad and they simply scatter out of his way like a flock of panicked birds. Not exactly approved formation but safety first, he's sure.

He follows the ephemeral pull, flexing his fingers. Realizes eventually, as the black floor disappears under his boots and he turns and turns and turns again, where he must be going. Of course they've chosen to meet him there. That might be the one place on this entire ship that could take the damage without compromising the structural integrity of the rest.

He keeps himself small in the Force. He'll need every advantage.

The closer he gets to target, the more troopers he sees. Eventually they stop even pretending they're going anywhere in particular and are just parked at parade rest in ranks along the walls.

In the final corridor, there's no more white; just the heavy black of the elite squads, Hux's pride and joy. The weapons aren't holstered anymore, gleaming dark and silver in jointed hands and he sees no few chain whips as well. His general might be outdoing himself for caution.

Or then again, maybe not.

Outside the door, Hux himself is actually waiting for him.

His fingers twitch with the urge to draw his saber now. He can feel them. The strength of their combined presence is irritant and pleasure and aversion, the bite of tiny jaws everywhere like insects. The skin between his shoulder blades is crawling with it.

"Supreme Leader. A word."

He growls and his modulator flattens it into menace. "I'm a little busy, General Hux."

"Warlord Ren. I'm sure you can spare me a moment."

He could continue right through the man. He answers to no one and he has a very urgent appointment waiting for him a bare hundred feet away now.

Yet the corridor is lined in black retaliation. There's enough firepower here to cow a small city and there are hundreds more behind these in cascading ranks of fallback. And for all that reassurance Hux has chosen to be precisely here at what might, some handful of minutes away, become ground zero. That has to mean something and he is trying not to be any more of a fool than he has to be.

He gives in to his agitation though and drops the saber hilt to his hand. He strides forward implacably, taking in the flicker of fear that the other man cannot help, the half step back that Hux takes before he stops himself.

He halts only when his right shoulder is hard against Hux's. He can feel the rigid line of the other man's body hot against his even through the padded armor. His saber presses against Hux's thigh. Warning, maybe. Certainly a reminder. A word then if he wants one, but Hux was not apparently expecting one that could be whispered.

He half turns his head. "Yes?" he inquires gently.

"You make it impossible to deal with you," the other man finally gets out between clenched teeth. It's quiet enough, the words half caught against Ren's black shoulder. Perhaps this will just be between the two of them.

"Is that all?"

"No," is the answer. "You haven't given me orders on what to do if you don't come out of there."

"Do you need them?"

"I can craft a battle plan before I've finished breakfast," is the snapped reply. "Is this enough? How long should I wait?"

It's strange. Of all the things he's anticipated, this is not one of them. This is nowhere close to _any_ of them. He turns his head to stare down at Hux in surprise. The commander of the armies of the First Order looks back and his face seems much as always, the same haughty expression, the same unreasoning fire behind green eyes.

And yet.

"Loyalty?" he asks softly. "From you?"

"Self preservation."

He smiles behind the mask. True. And that answer will serve as well as any other.

"Adding more will not help. I want you on the flight deck, ready to launch if necessary. Order your men to shoot anything that comes through this door."

"Including you?" Hux is impassive, his expression austere for all that there's something oddly tight under the words. He has no time to tease at it.

"I'd survive it," he rumbles in ghost amusement.

Hux blinks, but turns his head away to look back over Ren's shoulder at the soldiers waiting to enact what would be slaughter in any other circumstance. "You overestimate yourself."

"No," he replies, "in this case, General Hux, I do not. Remove yourself, be ready to contain this. Are we done?"

"Yes, Supreme Leader." Hux steps away then, turning into a half bow, crisp and precise. "It shall be as you command."

Kylo walks towards the door.

They're silent on the dais.

Of all that were, only these six remain. They stand in a rough circle on the highest platform, each with their weapon to hand. Waiting. He has to blink away memories both old and new because he's been here before. Oh, he's been here before and he keeps returning to it again and again.

This is where they were broken and made, much as he was. This is where they became his in truth or he became theirs because leashes can be held from both ends as everyone in his life has found out, often only at the moment that he wraps his fist around it. What is old is new again.

He strides down the walkway and his boots ring in the cavernous silence.

This is where they took on the black. This is where the rest refused to renounce the white, faced with the last step into the dark and he finished the slaughter he started at Skywalker's temple. This is where they could have chosen to wear the red and they'd already be dead, cut down like dogs.

As if any of the Knights would consent to mere guard duty. If they had, perhaps Snoke would still be alive and he wouldn't need to do this again.

"Kylo Ren."

He stops where he always has at the foot of the dais, enjoying the twist of formality even now, looking up at them. They are as masked and armored as he is although his weapon is still quiet at his side. A few precious moments more where nothing has yet to change.

He really doesn't want to die here, he discovers. There is still so much to do. Was this the right thing? Should he have left them where they were? Done as Snoke would have and pitted them against each other until they were weak enough to fall one at a time, his hands essentially clean?

"Master of Ren," he corrects.

"Supreme Leader, I thought. Got that through the grapevine." That comes from the far left, the slightest of the Knights. Always mouthy, always the first to push. Her mask is the closest to human, a black skull reflecting nothing. Her poleaxe rests on her shoulder, not yet engaged.

"None of you actually care who the Supreme Leader was or is. You care who I am."

"And who are you?" From the center this time, the deeply cowled figure picking up the thread.

"Kylo Ren. Master of the Knights of Ren."

He breathes. Tastes the air and the Force currents swirling like murky water, doubling back on themselves over and over like an ouroboros. The Knights are half tangled in each other and it's hard to separate them. There's no consensus yet that he can tell, no flicker of any one singular action. Perhaps this will go differently than he expects. Half his plans were contingent on the understanding that they'd be at his throat four seconds after he walked in the door and here they are, talking.

"Are you?" A third replies and the room shades darker, closer to that detonation. The vibro-baton spins in a circle, the reinforced head sullenly alight with channeled power. This one does want to fight. The red glow leaves a trail in the air. "I don't think you can be both. It's probably a conflict of interest."

"Did you want to pick yourselves a new leader then?" That's a possibility he hadn't considered. He spends a heartbeat on it.

"Would you let us?" A sweet tenor voice this time with a flicker of idle curiosity. One blaster is already in his grip but its pointed at nothing, the other holstered. Undecided. Unwilling to commit.

"No. You're either mine or you're dead."

"You can't take all of us, Kylo." The first one moves forward then, the first step towards action and the Force starts to converge on her. The weapon on her shoulder grounds itself on the slick floor although the killing edge still remains dark. "You were stupid to bring us all here like this, as much as it's nice to not see your face again."

He smiles at that. His own thought, now that he has them, a hot rush of something close to rightness. Assesses them with eyes that measure who they are, assesses their hunger. They've gotten stronger.

Then again, so has he.

"I recalled you," he corrects. "I didn't tell you when or how. Yet here you are, all of you, just like old times. Did you miss each other? Miss me perhaps?" He opens himself up a little more. They... did. All of them are pleased to see him in some manner. The youngest in fact is shivering on a high note of near welcome, so thin as to be a thread.

Something tangs discordantly in the Force, a string plucked out of tune.

"Enough of this," snaps out the fifth, the tallest, the one with the heaviest blade. "I'm not here find out who's missed who the most. There is no Master of Ren now. Release us."

That... was wrong. That felt wrong. They were unsure, questioning, feeling him out. Now they are suddenly close to merge and the vibration behind it is sour and unbalanced. The fragile feeling of pleasure starts to dissipate into the gestalt.

"I will not." He pushes it back out, grounding himself. "Submit to me again, and live."

"No. You will release us or die."

"I don't want to kill you," he tries, struggling to trace the source of it. He extends tendrils of compulsion, lacing his voice with harmonics. "_Submit to me_. Renew your faith in the dark, in me."

It almost works. He feels the hesitation, the wish of all things to stay as they are, to stay together, to reaffirm the same promises. They have been his, after all, for as long as he has known himself to be what he is. They have yielded before. They will again.

The wrong note sounds again, a beat out of sync with itself. It breaks across everything like a spill of acid.

"No," the second and fourth say together, whiplash snarl from the right.

She takes one more step on the left and everything collapses into diamond. "The Supreme Leader is gone and _we can take you_."

They snap together and the decision is made as every weapon powers up.

They have the high ground and they are six to his one. Force sensitive, armed according to their natures; as vicious as they wish to be, as savage as they were taught to be. They will move nearly as one, think as one, a creature of many parts.

But none of them are him.

This was the only way it could ever go. He was a fool to hope for anything else.

He ignites his saber as he throws himself wide. They are as one and they recoil as one as the utter maelstrom of his spirit lashes out to smother the room.

He surges up the stairs. They are off balance for only a splinter of time but it's all he needs. The baton strikes a glancing blow off his shoulder as he dodges the lance aiming for his heart, so close the metal slides across his armor, scoring a silver line. He ducks to let the poleaxe whistle over his head, red edge a scream in his ear, thrusting out a hand to freeze the blaster bolts. Smashes the Knight who shot at him right to the wall. Then he's on the same ground they are and it starts.

It's a nightmare blur after that.

They split and split again, melee and ranged and he has to guard against it all. His saber shrieks with rage, deflecting, punishing, correcting. The Force is a living weapon in his hands and he reaches harder and harder into it to make up the difference.

On and on and _on_, sliding black and red and furious through the shadows that spin and scatter away from him in this place. They are _his_, they will _always_ be _his_, he will remind them who they are, who they belong to and his hand wraps around their collective leash and _yanks_.

At one point he realizes he's dropped his saber entirely. It fights at his back, defending against the ragged chain fire as he batters his target with the scream of his will alone, one smash after the other, hands grasping. He feels their chest crush, ribs snap, and they drop. He grabs for the next closest, a whip of power to wrench them into range, reaching up over his shoulder for the saber hilt to finish it.

He's practiced this move so many times, the one handed spin that will sever a body in half.

It's his first, the woman who chose to wear a skull for reasons he can't remember. She's lost her poleaxe somewhere, has a blaster instead that she's trying to bring to bear but she's much too slow and she knows it and he knows it as he starts the terminus.

She manages to wrench herself out of the Force pull at the last possible second. He takes her arm off instead, slicing up into her shoulder and she screams.

He drops her. There are two lunging at his back, one high, one low.

There's no time to turn, his saber howling for blood in his hands. Raises his foot and stomps, a concussive blast to shatter against the walls. They stagger, falling away and he whirls, shoving _forward_ and goes for the kill on both.

Between one moment and the next, their combined will crumbles under his. He pulls up his strike just before completion, the heat of his saber so close to touching the cowl on his target that the fabric starts to curl with heat.

The standing fall to their knees like marionettes on a single string.

"We submit." Six voices, one surrender. "Kylo Ren, Master of Ren."

Nothing moves.

He swallows his own blood over and over again, throat working. It's hard to let go. He wants to hurt and hurt and _hurt_ until there is nobody left to defy him.

His hand wavers with the urge to finish it, never to have to come here again. His saber extinguishes finally though and the loss of sound is terrible, ringing in his ears. Kylo straightens painfully, squeezing his hands in rhythm. Hurt. He will hurt them.

No, he won't. They are his again. He doesn't hurt what's his.

As he stands there motionless he feels them fracture and fall apart, unique again, individual again. The fallen struggle to rise to their knees, to offer obeisance. Only the one that's lost her arm stays down, clutching at her belly, whimpering on the ground.

Moment by moment, he pulls himself back from the edge, releases the blood lust. Only realizes then how much he'd affected reality as the shadows retreat back to the walls.

"Give yourselves to me," he croaks out finally and extends his hand.

The mental walls drop and he swarms into their minds, clawing down to their very cores without care. It had gone wrong for a reason and he will know why.

He finds it in her. His first, her arm gone, her mind blackened around the edges with pain and frustrated, panicked deception. He snarls behind his mask, turning on his heel. His cloak swings out and he has her up in the air a heartbeat later, ripping her mask off with a gesture.

"_You_."

He sinks mental hooks into it and rips that out as well, shredding everything as he goes. She struggles, legs kicking. She'd scream but she can't. There is only the muffled struggle for breath, for life, harsh and sobbing between her red teeth.

"You tried to take them from me because you couldn't do it alone. They _wanted_ to yield and you didn't. You tried to take them all so you could take _me_."

"Kylo… please. Don't. Have mercy. I yield. I _yield_!"

"Did you even have a plan for afterwards?"

The saber ignites in a rush of white hot fury and he lets it happen. The cauterized pieces drop to the floor a heartbeat later.

Once upon a time, Ben had shared breakfasts with her in a mess hall on a planet filled with water. Once upon a time, she'd been something close to a friend, somebody not a stranger. Somebody who'd believed.

He feels sick. Betrayed again and now they are only five.


	8. need

"We have to get out of here!"

"Working on it!" he yells back over his shoulder. He scans ahead frantically. They're being driven closer and closer to the town edge and the rough plascrete wall that surrounds the place is starting to loom. If they can't lose these guys they're going to get jammed up against it and he really doesn't like the odds of them being able to talk their way out of it at that point.

His flight boots weren't made for running and he curses under his breath. Exit, exit, where in the shifting flux is the exit from here? He scans the dark sky but the town lights are everywhere and the gate lights are lost in the general glare against the cloud layer.

Left? Away from the damned wall at least. They've turned a lot of corners so far.

He runs right past it, then curses, skidding to a halt. Rey nearly ploughs into his back.

"This way!" He grabs her arm and yanks, pelting down the side road. A curl of hair is sticking to her cheek, nearly in her mouth. He looks back over her shoulder but the bounty hounds chasing them haven't appeared yet. Maybe this will work.

"What? Poe!" Then she sees what he did and yelps with excitement, putting on another burst of speed from somewhere.

Somewhere along the way, somebody started using the far end of this dead end between the buildings as a dumping ground. Broken crates, garbage sacks, wooden slats, shuffled pieces of what might be furniture or might be chunks of vehicle, it's hard to tell and he doesn't really care. The important part is that most of it is shoved right up against the protective wall and if they can get to the top of the stack, they might be able to jump to safety.

The leading edge of their pursuers rounds the corner and the cry goes up.

Rey shoots her blaster backwards, the energy splashing harmlessly on the cobblestones ahead of the mob. The first ones flinch back but they keep coming. "But I don't want to hurt them," she says breathlessly. "It's not their fault."

"Don't have to explain it to me," he grunts, leaping up to grab his first handhold. "C'mon, climb."

He scrambles. The stack isn't all that stable but there's a lot of it so it's mostly working. He grabs her by the forearm and hauls her up with him. She shoots again, near sobbing with adrenaline.

"Go, Rey, go!"

She climbs, getting higher and he fumbles with his own blaster, thinking if he can just hold them back a little longer Rey can get out and… he has no idea what to do after that, but it has to be better than the situation that they're in right now and he'll definitely take that as a win. He aims for a wall above their heads and sparks and chips rain down, aims for another. It gives them a few precious seconds as nobody wants to be the first one to take a shot to the face no matter what the bounty is on foreigners. The three in the lead backpedal, trying to scatter to the sides in the little room they have and it jams up the ones behind them.

"Poe, it's too high!"

He snaps his head up and damn it all to the seven hells and back, she's right. She's gotten up nearly as far as she can, and it's still a good four meters to safety. Her hand stretches up, slapping against the wall with fingers wriggling as if that alone will bring the top down to her. She jumps, jumps again and he can hear the sob in her throat.

"Hold on, hold on, I'll lift you up!" He starts to turn back to her and something in the pile shifts, twisting. He loses his footing and suddenly he's half on his back, sliding down in a pile of wreckage. Shit. Shit.

Rey shoots a look of horror over her shoulder. Her eyes snap to the mob that's nearly on top of them, nearly on top of him.

"I _can't!_" she pleads. She spins back, turning to him instead of trying to get over that karking wall. She plants her feet as if she's trying to find stability. "I won't leave him!"

"Rey!" he yells. "Get out of here!"

_"I don't know how!"_

It happens right in front of him. There's something stupidly sharp jammed into his back, one hand caught underneath him with his blaster and Rey hasn't even got hers up anymore and they're going to be dragged down off this pile in about four seconds and beaten bloody at best and they'll be lucky to be still be alive afterwards to be hauled off to whatever passes for the local jail while somebody calls the First Order and tells them they've got two of the Resistance in body bags and what the _kriff_ is she _thinking_—

—and suddenly somebody is standing behind her.

Black on black on yet more black, toweringly tall. Pale skin. Dark eyes. Wild hair and a mouth twisting in a snarl.

And he knows he's never seen that face before in his life, but he knows that body, knows that uniform, knows exactly who he has to be looking at even if he can't possibly be looking at what he thinks he's looking at because that is not even _remotely_ possible and for a second that lasts the entire heat death of the universe, he's frozen between knowing and believing.

The man's right hand is hard against the back of Rey's neck, bare fingers digging into flesh as if she's a doll he's holding up.

No, that's not a man at all, that's Kylo Ren that's Kylo kriffing _Ren_ standing there as if summoned from the depths of the deepest gravity well he's ever been ordered to fly through and he watches with incredibly weird clarity considering the alternate universe he's just cracked his skull open on as their heads move in eerie tandem to look back down the street.

Like they're both puppets on the same set of strings, they raise their left hands together.

The shockwave rips over his head.

He twists his head around painfully in time to see every single one of their pursuers drop, hitting the ground kicking. Most stop moving almost instantly but some still twitch, spasming on the stone. He turns back in time to see Rey start to drop her hand but Kylo doesn't. His outstretched fingers start to curl and Poe's blood freezes in his veins because he knows that gesture much too well, knows it all the way down to where his nightmares live.

"Don't hurt them!"

And he stops. The leader of the First Order half tilts his head, eyes narrowing but his hand actually stops moving. "Why?"

"Because it's not their fault. Not really. They've stopped, Ren." Her voice wobbles and then steadies. "We stopped them. Please don't do it."

"They were going to hurt you for the money. Kill you. One will sell you in pieces if it will bring more." The voice is the same and not the same and Poe shudders. There's remembered agony drifting underneath that deep calm and he decides then and there that he never wants to hear Kylo Ren actually angry. How can the man just stand there and sound like he does while discussing what sounds horribly like organ harvesting?

"Don't." Her voice is clear enough but her chest expands once, twice. "They're desperate. You don't need to hurt them for it."

Poe shifts, struggling up on one elbow. At the scraping sound two sets of eyes swivel down to stab him as if they had both actually forgotten he was there and the worst part is that for a moment her eyes are empty of anything approaching recognition. Her blaster lifts and suddenly he's staring up the dark barrel of it from ten feet away. He freezes into immobility. Over her shoulder, Ren is glaring down at him.

He's going to die.

Then Rey wrenches her arm aside. "No!"

Ren growls. "Then I'll carve it out of him." The black gloved hand stretches for him and Poe wonders what he ever did in his entire life to deserve being taken out by the strongest hallucination he's ever had.

Rey reaches out her hand and put it on Ren's. Lightly, so very lightly, pushing it down. "No. You won't do that either."

"Rey."

"He's my friend."

The rumble in the air isn't something he ever wants to hear again and he tells it to go live with his nightmares and make nice. "That's not enough."

"You know it is. Please."

Finally the hand lowers.

Then nothing moves. Poe afraid to even breathe as they stand frozen as if neither of them know what to do next.

Then slowly, carefully, his face bends down to hers as she half turns into his body and suddenly it's like he doesn't even exist anymore. He's never been more grateful for anything else in his life.

Long pale fingers start to hesitantly move on Rey's neck, curling around softly to stroke skin. She swallows and worse Ren dips his head and then his mouth is in her hair and his long, mad eyes close and Poe feels suddenly like he really needs to not be looking at this. But there's nowhere he can go because nobody has to tell him that it will absolutely be worth his life if he's stupid enough to bring himself to Ren's attention a second time in as many minutes.

"Thank you," Rey breathes. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I panicked."

"I'm here."

She hiccups and then there is laughter, if soft and tinged with hysteria. "Yes, you are. I'm so stupid." She brings a hand up and angrily scrubs at her eye. "I didn't mean to call you. Then again, I never mean it, do I?"

There's something raw in her voice.

"Liar. You always mean it. Which is why I'm always here." His hand hesitates and then touches her cheek. Black gloved knuckles carefully move over her skin, tracing the edges.

"Why is it like this? Why is it _always_ like this?"

"I don't know." And the absolute softness of it is strained and terrible and Poe is pretty sure he wouldn't want to know this even about his best friend, but definitely not about anybody who's responsible for so many deaths his robes ought to be dripping blood. "You need to stop needing me."

"I can't."

Breath expels and he doesn't know if its his or hers or just theirs. Finally Ren lifts his head and Poe finds himself staring into dark eyes locked to his above the crown of Rey's hair.

Shit.

He braces himself for it but nothing happens. Rey's blaster dangles in her hand, her face pressed into the black hollow of his throat. His hand is locked on the back of her head, holding her against him.

The moments tick by and inanely all Poe can think as he lies sprawled on his back is that the Supreme Leader of the First Order doesn't look anywhere near old enough to have done even half of what he's done.

Then the man takes a step back, his fingers unlock and he's gone.

Rey scrubs her face and fumbles her blaster back into its holster. The groans behind him suddenly start up again as if a recording just switched back on and he realizes belatedly that they're not actually out of trouble yet, not by a long shot.

"Can I move now?" he asks as he starts to move. "Because I think I need to start moving now because we really, really need to get out of here at this point. Like, right now or even sooner."

"Poe?"

"Later. Way, way later, Rey, or we might still end up on tonight's menu. I promise you can explain it all to me much later after I drink something that guarantees I won't remember anything about it."

She half slides down the pile of rusted machinery and he reaches out and lets her grab his arm and together they're on their feet and escaping.


	9. careless

He's careless with his face and she hates that more than anything else.

She trembles in the restraints and she pushes it out because she doesn't want it to stay with her, that fear, that terror, these things that should never belong to her so she shoves it away, onto him. It shouldn't stick, after all, his mask a silver reflection that nothing could ever stick to. But he discards it easily enough and stands looking down at her as if his face isn't anything to be concerned with, as if his flesh is just as impossible to stain.

If she'd've been asked, what he looked like, what terrible thing was concealed there, she's not sure she would have had an answer. Something dark, something malevolent. A face marred by war and cruelty maybe, a myriad of outward signs that would match the black robes, the black deeds of thought and intent.

He's careless with his face and what it does to others.

He takes the mask off again for his father, drops it even as if it means nothing. She doesn't want to understand but oh, she does, even if she can't hear what they say to each other as Han moves closer and closer over a more literal abyss. He has to know that face is the bait but Han walks towards it anyways and she is terrified, heart in her throat with steel impervious under her hands and what warning could she give that Han would not already know? Too far away to be anything but backdrop and she watches helplessly as he dies for it, spitting sparks, and the last thing he does is what she wanted to do and couldn't with her hands tied down.

She hates him for so many things but for the lie of his face most of all.

She carves it open because in that moment she could and she tells herself that she means it, tells herself later when she's shaking and near sick with reaction that it's vengeance and justification and less than he deserves. Unheard and unseen in a cargo bay she curls around herself, hands pulled to her chest. Her back is braced against the engine room wall as hard as she can, letting the kiloton thrust of power shuddering into her shoulders override the memory of just what it felt like, overriding one sensation with another, hammering it home into her heart for as long as she can stay angry. She doesn't want to think back on this and be able to separate the feelings.

Blood on the snow, pain everywhere she looks and his face is carelessly beautiful with the lights in his eyes, with murder on his hands and in his heart and she wants so badly to touch that even as she slides between stars, she tucks her fingers away to keep from reaching out.


	10. control 2

The stars are everywhere.

He sprawls on his master's throne, the glass pressed to his temple, and fills himself with it.

They've been holding for days in dark space, far away from any planetary systems which is unusual enough. These ships are weapons and if they are not pointed at something or someone they are not serving their purpose. Hiding in the deep emptiness is not something the First Order does, as a rule.

Still, there are always necessary calibrations, both mechanical and political and in this case cautionary. For the moment Hux is in command of where and how they are realigning and he has no agenda other than spite to cause a shift in their plans. Better they are here than anywhere else. Soon enough he needs to be a few hundred parsecs from here but that is then and this is now.

Three days ago he released the remaining Knights to their tasks. Three nights and he needs to drown this however he can.

There is no red here anymore, only black. Black unto infinity everywhere he looks with the pinpricks of lights in their tens of millions to carpet it like diamonds. The viewport windows arcing high overhead give the near complete illusion that he's sitting under a night sky. He has the nearly empty bottle of whiskey after all, the fracture of his heart and the solitude to make it real. It's only missing the cool breeze and the ability to stand up to trip over a clump of grass down a cliff by mistake.

He closes his outward eyes to open the inner ones.

So much life. He can't hold it all, even if he wanted to. So much death. Unravelling and combining, falling apart and coming together again over and over and over again, relentlessly. He reaches further and further, inhaling as much as he can to burn through muscle, through bone. All precious. All irrelevant.

Kylo tilts his head back against the throne and lets it wash through him, saturation and goad. Both of his masters were skilled, their knowledge chasms deep in their respective arts. Both wanted desperately to have him be something, do something for them and yet here he is; neither jedi nor sith, neither apprentice nor master, caught still it seems between the things he wants and the things he can't be permitted to have.

It feels like his veins are incandescent. He can feel the ship around him as if it was alive, because it is. He could tear it apart from here, and he wants to so badly. Hux would probably not approve.

The potential of his bloodline indeed. Everytime he looks, he sees more. And every time he looks, he hates what he learns.

He opens his eyes just in time to feel the shunt as the gears grind, lock and everything shudders to a stop.

"You really need to not be here," he says after a moment.

"As if we ever have a choice," she replies. It's only a little bitter - she'd like it to be his fault, he's sure. She keeps her head down as she twists her hair, working with jerky motions. There's light wherever she is, gracing her skin into flickers of gold, touching pale fingers to the column of her neck. A tremble of unwilling sunshine in the center of his stars and he'd laugh if there was anything amusing about it.

He watches because there's no reason he shouldn't. What he wants and can't be permitted to have. At least she's still alive.

She's stubborn today. She pulls on her boots, tiny clicks against the floor as she settles into them. Snags a dark cloth belt from nowhere to wind around herself, tucking the loose fabric tight against her waist, knotting it there to fall away against her leg. She turns, cutting him off to shrug into a hooded cloak, working clever fingers at one shoulder clasp then the other to seat it right. Lightweight, meant for showers, not storms. And it's only when she's clothed, armored, ready to face whatever is happening to her world that she finally consents to look at him.

She freezes. Her fine eyebrows knit together as she stares which is very strange. She's shot at him, yelled at him, ignored him, stomped away from him more than once, even cried at him but she's never just stood there with that arrested expression before. He's not sure what it is but it's at least different. He tilts his head.

She blows out a breath. "Ren?" she asks.

"Yes."

"What's wrong?"

That's worth a smile so he gives her one. "Touch me and find out."

She doesn't smile back and she doesn't step any closer. "Where are you?" she asks after a moment.

"One of Snoke's throne rooms. My throne room now, I suppose." He watches the unseen light catch in her eyes, curious if she'll step into shadow at some point. She has to be inside but whatever window she's near must be large. Planetside for sure. Temperate enough to have windows facing out, for the clothing she's wearing. Not that that narrows down the options. "I had all the curtains torn down. I think you'd like it."

"You're drinking."

"Yes."

"What are you doing, Ren?"

"Taking a calculated risk," he replies. "You?"

"Getting ready to go out and… do things."

"Ah, yes. Things. Important Resistance things, I'm sure."

Her nostrils flare. "I do what I can."

He shrugs, fervently hoping the link will cut out. There's still liquid in his glass and it sloshes at the tiny motion, so he sits up and inhales the last of that as well. The burn is muted now but still warm enough for all that and he appreciates it, for doing what little it can. He carefully puts it down on the arm. Translucent, it nearly disappears into the black.

He wonders how he looks to her. He's discarded his outer armor but he's always in black; boots, pants, tunic, clasp open at the shoulder and gaping down because having anything tight across his throat right now would be… not ideal. A pit of shadow, in the center of her sun? Can she see the stars?

Of course she can't. He's swallowed them.

"Are you drunk?"

"No. Or at least, not as much as I would like to be." His lips twist for that. "I told you, a calculated risk. There isn't much that can blunt me for long without risking worse side effects."

"Side effects? No." She changes her mind mid-thought, he can see her wondering which question she actually wants answered. "How is getting drunk a calculated risk? It's not like it's hard. Seems like half of everybody here manages it without even really trying. Particularly the pilots." There's some personal exasperation there. He files it away for later consideration.

"The Resistance pilots aren't force sensitive. Well," he ameliorates, "that's not precisely true. Your Best Pilot is bright enough to shine. Don't tell him I said so though, he's already too sure of himself. At least when he's not screaming out his secrets."

Her expression turns thunderous. It takes him a moment to understand that what he's feeling is akin to regret. He's almost sorry for reminding her of her friend's pain. He flicks his fingers in a negating motion and settles back, lifting one leg to cross his ankle on the opposite knee. "I apologize. I didn't mean to say that. Along with everything else alcohol does for me, it still lowers filters."

"Everytime I think…" She clenches a hand at her side. "I hate you, you know. You're a vile, horrible man, Ben Solo."

The fire he's hoarding in his blood flares and his voices reaches out harder than he intended it to, rolling like undertow across the floor. "Stop it. _No_. Ben Solo is gone." Something nearby chimes, shivering unhappily. "Stop trying to pretend that confused boy is somewhere inside of me still."

She jerks her chin up defensively. "You can't hide from yourself, Ben. You can't hide from who you are and what you've done. Drinking and brooding… and feeling sorry for yourself." She makes an impatient gesture at him. Her feet have moved to a defensive stance in the last few moments at least and somewhere he approves. She should never let her guard down with him.

He snaps his teeth. "Does it look like I'm hiding? Is that what you think this is? You keep saying that name like the person you think it belongs to will come back if you say it often enough. You never knew _Ben_. You weren't there. What do you know about any of it?"

"More than you think! I know you took my friend and dragged his mind through a sieve. His nightmares have _your_ voice in them. And you tried to do it to me too, but you couldn't because I'm stronger! And I know that _Ben Solo_ is afraid he can't measure up, because I saw it in _you_, Kylo Ren."

"Are you stronger then?" he inquires. "Have we decided that? Still, that's better. I am not confused about who I am. But you are."

"You are _divided_. I _saw_ it."

"And you are nothing at all! You came from nowhere, you are going nowhere. Who's left to teach you what is possible but me?" He growls with anger and frustration. "But ah, no. Not me, never me. Anything but me. Because you know so much, when you don't even know my name."

She jerks her head and there, there are the start of tears. Why does she cry so often at him? He's not wrong. "Don't I? Don't I know you? You're just going to sit there and tell me there's only Kylo Ren when I still see Ben in you? Just a monster in black, no light, no compassion, who takes what he likes and hurts who he likes and kills who he likes?"

"Sometimes," he agrees softly. "And sometimes I hurt and kill for you."

She flinches at that as he meant her to. "Don't you put that on me. Don't you _ever_ put that on me."

"Would you rather be dead instead? You'll care for some truths but not the rest?" He glares down his nose at her. Damn the sun she's standing under, that lights her hair and sparks honey in her eyes. "Always wanting the answers as long as you can agree with them. Just like Skywalker."

"Luke was a good man!" And yet as soon as she says it he can see the collapse, the breath she sucks in.

He laughs and it hurts and it seems like that is all he is ever going to be able to have. "Your precious Skywalker tried to put a blade through my heart. For the crime of daring to have doubts that what he was doing was right."

"He regretted it. He regretted it, I know he did. He showed me!"

"And he still _did it_. Stood over me while I slept, while I trusted, and he wanted me _dead_ because he could think of nothing else that would help." He flexes his hands helplessly in front of him, wishing he had his gloves at least. "Would you like to know how that feels?" he seethes.

"Ben…"

"No. No. Ben is _dead_, stop pretending! I have made too many choices to ever be him. Over and over again I made and _continue_ to make those choices, and you are lying to both of us by clinging to it. Let it _go_."

She stands in sunlight, warm and bright and hating him and hoping for things that will never happen and in this moment if he could smash it all down, plunge it all into darkness, he would and he would howl in the doing of it. He stands because he has to do _something_ with his body, wrenching himself to his full height, his hands in fists because if he reaches out he will grab and _pull_ and rend. He hasn't drunk enough for this too, not on top of the rest. He still feels.

"My entire life, I have never… my mother gave up, my father left us both, but both of them wanted me _fixed_. My uncle wanted me _different_. Snoke wanted me _broken_. I have been in control of _nothing_ my entire life and you are not going to stand there and tell me you want me to be somebody else! That you are _disappointed!_"

The universe twists simply because he wills it so. Glass shatters along with the bottle at his feet and the starfield wavers because of the pressure he's exerting in reflex and there is pain in his hand, in his mind, in his heart. Something just out of sight cries with strain, metal crumpling. He fills his lungs and closes his eyes because if he has to keep looking at her face, he is going to do something truly terrible. Tells himself again that Hux will not be happy if he breaks the ship.

Blood starts to drip from his fingers. He listens and breathes and watches light and darkness eat each other alive. All precious. All _irrelevant_.

"You do not understand," he whispers, shuddering, trying to shed the worst of it off like rain. "You are as alone as I am and you do not understand what I have done or why I've done it."

She growls, the sound tiny. "So help me understand."

That's worth a smile so he gives her one, wondering what it looks like on his face. "_Touch me_. And I'll show you."

He says the words but it's a shock when he hears her moving, a whisper of fabric and he opens his startled eyes just in time to see her reach out. He doesn't even have time to flinch away before her fingers are locked against his throat, splaying in heated lines under his ear.

They both stiffen in shock. He feels her surprise, her fury that is already crumbling under the onslaught but it's too late, his blood glitters with starlight and power and she smells of sunshine and dust. He can't help it, grabs her by the back of the neck to pull her forehead to his. Her breath on his face, even as his is on hers. Skin to skin everything surges, spilling from him into her.

Her touch is the only stability. His blood trickles, smears against her. He presses his lips to her ear in a fever.

"Snoke," he says desperately, trying not to unravel because he did not expect her to _do it_, "wanted me broken for a reason. Over and over again, to keep me in place, to keep me on my knees. My master just as Skywalker was and he was strong in the Dark because he studied it, immersed himself in it for years beyond counting. Courted it like a lover, gave it every sacrifice it asked for and more. And not _once_ did he touch what I can do."

"_Stars_. I feel. Everything," she breathes. "All of it. _Everywhere_."

"When I reach, this is what I see. This is what _is_."

"What have you done?" Her thoughts are starting to tangle with his, even as her body sways into his or his into hers.

He moves his lips helplessly over her temple, the corner of her eye. "What I had to. Control. I will have _control_ of this. Someone who was there is dead. Someone who knew Ben. Knew me, as I was then. Chose me, as I was _then_. Followed me from the light into the dark because they believed. In _me_."

His hand strokes hard down her side because he can do nothing else, even as her other hand slides helplessly into the gapped collar of his shirt, dragging heat and callus along his collarbone. So good. So right.

"Tell me."

"Chose me, Rey. Dead because they tried to betray me and I put my saber through them. And I am drinking because if I don't smother this pain, I will crack this dreadnought apart by its seams because I didn't want to do it and I am _angry_ that it was necessary. And because I am drinking, I am remembering Han Solo and that the Dark wants sacrifices that mean something. And _because I am drinking_ my walls are down and I can see what Skywalker saw in me and what Snoke wanted as he tore me apart and whatever he thought he knew, he wasn't even close to it. This was a very calculated risk," he breathes, "and you were not supposed to be here to give me a target for it."

"_Ben._"

"My _name_, Rey," he hisses out between his teeth, nuzzling behind her ear, dragging his chin over the soft skin. "You are nothing and no one. No one ever wanted anything from you, because no one thought you capable of anything. You could go back to your desert tomorrow, disappear into the sands and no one would look for you or could find you if they did. Do what I couldn't. _Run_."

Her hand locks into his hair and he shudders. Run his cheek over hers obsessively, curls an arm hard around her waist to haul her in. Her breath skitters over his collarbone, his throat, her fingers curling to scratch hard down his chest through the cloth and he wants her teeth, her mouth, the air she struggles for. If he kisses her, if they kiss… he distracts himself with the feel of her, hands grasping over and over. Hip, waist, the splay of her ribs under his spreading fingers. He expands _out_ and pulls yet more _in_ and starts to bleed it into her, everywhere they touch, faster and faster. The alcohol in his gut isn't enough to hold this back.

"My grandfather was a Skywalker. As my mother is. And my father broke the record on the Kessel Run by threading a needle between two hungry singularities because the universe loved him just that much." He closes his mouth over the hinge of her jaw because he can't help it anymore and cannot tell whether the groan is his or hers. "I was born to this. For this. The Light told me I was supposed to care for nothing and _I feel everything_."

She cries out and shoves him back and he lets her.

And there is still light on her hair but her eyes are wide and angry as he is angry and her mouth is nearly snarling.

"What's my name?" he growls.

"Kylo Ren," she shudders back.

"They chose _me_ and they died. You didn't even do that much. And if it's necessary to kill you too, I will."

"I know. I feel it. You don't feel sorry for yourself at all, do you?"

He swallows and of course she is gone.

He shudders and his eyes are black. He reaches out and the floor buckles, heaving up.

He stops short of breaching the windows at least.


	11. look

warning: smut/adult content

* * *

The door irises shut behind him and he strips off the gloves with a curse. The belt follows, hitting the far wall with a clatter. The heavy overtunic is easy, the tabs are meant to release when he pulls but fuck the shirt, he's not dealing with it. Grabs over his shoulder and just hauls it off, buttons pinging everywhere in protest. He scatters all of it like morbidly dark leaves as he stalks across the room to the fresher.

He's smeared with blood, the slash still oozing groggily where it cut the deepest.

There's many reasons for black clothing and this is not the least of them.

"Reflect," he hisses and the wall obligingly switches to echo. He inspects the damage. He earned this one, no question, too distracted with his own thoughts to notice when his sparring droids executed an attack sequence they had definitely not been programmed with and he wasn't prepared to defend against. One had actually slipped through to mark him. No doubt somebody's amateur assassination attempt and the fact that it actually scored has him in a foul mood.

The slice runs diagonally, a thin start skipping over his ribs under one nipple but starting to gouge on the downward stroke to end in a vicious hook at his hip. The heavy tunic had hidden the damage as he'd walked here so whoever was watching would know they'd failed but his pants are wet and sticky with the aftermath.

Kylo prods at it and growls.

He wipes off the worst of the blood, scrubbing where it's already dried. Every flex jabs at him. He should probably get the lower few inches stitched but then it won't hurt as much and what would be the point? Pain instructs. This is something he needs to remember for awhile.

Stripped to the waist, he walks back into the main room with a bacta gel pack in his hands though because regardless of what he'd prefer to do, it can't stay like this. He has too many other things to do today to be bleeding everywhere while he does it.

With a grimace Kylo peels the slashed material of his pants farther down his hip to fully expose the wound. The gel is cool on his fingers as he starts to swipe it on in long strokes, starting from the bottom. The prickle starts to work its way under the skin, pins and needles and artificial antiseptic calm.

The room echoes with unexpected susurration. Contracts and then painfully expands. He looks up.

She's sitting on something high, one leg pulled up to her chest in a casually loose clasp, the other dangling. That's as far as he gets though before her head jerks back and her eyes widen. Color hits her cheeks like a slap.

He freezes at the look on her face.

Her mouth opens. She fixates on his chest and he can feel the touch of it like a hand, it's so heavy. Her gaze jerks to his eyes for a heartbeat and then raggedly jumps to his shoulders, his arms, before raking down to stab at the exposed flesh of his stomach, lower still. Caught. Fascinated.

His heart hammers sickeningly hard in his chest. He's aware suddenly that she's staring at the curl of dark hair leading down to his groin, peeking out from where he'd shoved the material out of his way, the narrow line of muscle that pulls there.

Her tongue flashes out, wetting her lower lip and he feels _that_ as if she'd kissed him where her eyes are.

He straightens, as caught out as she is. He's already half hard from that alone, the curl of lust tightening as his body reacts even before he can.

She stares at his cock swelling and only then yanks her eyes away.

"Rey," he purrs. She says nothing, giving him only a blushing profile. Clutches her knee to her chest. "_Rey_. Look at me."

She takes a deep breath then another and then grudgingly swivels her head in his general direction, aiming her gaze somewhere to the far right of his shoulder. Beyond that, she doesn't move.

Curious, he takes a step forward. She flinches nearly imperceptibly but still doesn't move to escape like he expected she would. Doesn't shift back or away or even reply. The last time she'd snapped at him to put something on but this time, nothing.

He looks over his shoulder but of course there's nothing there but his own black wall. He turns back.

"Where are you?" he asks. "Somewhere you can't leave?"

She tries to school her face but she's terrible at it. Keeps staring off to his right as if there's something infinitely fascinating there. Her breath is shallow, he can see her chest rising and falling in helpless reaction.

"Is the General there? Your friends?"

She shakes her head a tiny bit but the color on her cheeks heightens.

"Yes," he smiles. "You're with your friends. Possibly my mother. The Resistance version of High Command? And you can't leave without people asking questions you can't answer, so... a meeting?"

Her eyes flick up to his face, very obviously not looking any lower than his chin. She scowls, shifting. Tries to smooth out her expression again with slightly better success this time.

"I can feel you," he breathes. "That hit you hard. Seeing me. Seeing me open. Do you remember the first time?"

The flicker of her eyelashes is his only answer but that's all he needs.

He looks again at where she's looking, trying to figure it out. "I remember the first time too," he says. "You were angry. So angry with me." He steps backwards until he impacts the wall, slides over until he's positioned near where she's staring so determinedly. The front of the room, her commanding officer, a projector for all he knows. The mutinous, panicked expression on her face is worth everything.

He sets his shoulders against the cold metal, widening his stance a little. "I like it when you're angry," he confesses to the air. He coats his fingers again with more of the healing gel and tosses the rest of the pack onto the floor to skitter away.

He looks down and starts to smear the bacta again, moving his hand over the wound, stroking higher and higher over his stomach, navel, to his ribs. Her breathing hitches and she's trying, he can see her trying but her gaze keeps coming back, over and over again to watch. He takes his time, running his fingers over skin, smearing both shine and blood traces along the length of the slash.

He shivers, flesh pebbling, and it has nothing to do with the sting.

"I like it when it looks like you want to fight," he continues as if he hadn't stopped. "To argue with me. I think sometimes of you biting me. And I think of biting you back."

It's foregone. She fixates again, this time on his mouth. He tenses his stomach and is rewarded twice when teeth indent into the corner of her lip and the pain of the pulled wound flushes over his senses, hardening his nipples.

"Did you want to then, Rey? Do you want to now? Sink your teeth into me, make me bleed a little more?"

Her eyes cut right, startled. "S...sorry? Oh. Uh. Just seventeen. So far," she says, her tone a little too high, definitely too fast. "Three more by tomorrow. That's… that's really all I can guarantee. For now." She nods once, and then again. "Yes. Yes, of course."

"Well done," he says after a moment when it appears whatever she's been asked was enough of an answer. "I wonder what you're talking about. Speeders? People? Droid repair? No matter." He wipes the excess bacta on his pants. "I don't actually care."

She looks at him helplessly, the urge to bolt writ large on her face. Her fingers are so tight, clutching at her bent leg. He wonders what anyone else would see other than the discomfort. The blush still lingers and he doesn't think it's going to go away anytime soon.

"I think about you all the time, you know," he continues conversationally. "Biting you. Sucking bruises into you, fucking you. My fingers sliding into you, kissing you senseless. The way you'll move under me. The sounds I want to hear you to make." He half closes his eyes, staring at her as he slides his hand into his pants. The gel traces on his fingers tingle sharply on the sensitive flesh as he wraps his grip around the head of his cock, pulling it away from the painful position it was in. "The way you'll feel, convulsing around me. Are you sure you can't leave?"

He can see the breath she takes, trembling as it is. But she shakes her head and for the first time, deliberately locks her gaze with his. Fuck, that's hot. He tightens even more, balls drawing up, and the groan he makes is half unwilling.

Fine. Okay. He can do better than this. He shoves the other side of his pants down so he can free himself properly, spreading his legs even more, elongating his body for her. Presses his shoulders hard into the wall.

"Do you see what you do to me, Rey," he whispers. "And you're not even here." He smears the palm of his hand over the head, coating it with himself and then strokes himself down, long and slow. He drops his head back against the wall, hips shifting in reflex because it feels so damned good. She's watching, she's watching and it's all he can do not to speed up.

"Sometimes I think about taking you hard. Up against a wall while you're angry, while you tell me that you'll never be with me, never want this from me. And I take you and take you and _take you_ because I can't help myself." The words pour out as his hand strokes. "Those damnably long legs of yours wrapped around my waist. Nails in my shoulders, in my back. Teeth in my ear, in my throat." He watches her face, wondering if that's something she's ever thought about. Maybe. Maybe not. "Look, Rey. Look at how hard I am for you."

Her eyes cut over again, looking at whatever is in her world but she look back guiltily, watching his fingers as they flash up and down. She shifts once, and then again, her hips moving in a tiny, fretful circle. He can feel it hit her again, the deep sweet that has no answer but touch and motion and frantic heat.

At least he can indulge.

"Sometimes. Sometimes I think about taking it slow." And he does, slipping the head of his cock between his fingers, teasing at himself. "I think about kissing you. I think about your mouth on me, so desperate. I think about hearing my name as you tremble under me, over me. As you thrash and fall apart for me. Just for me." His voice drops even lower without thinking about it and he hunches forward with the restlessness that his own words are painting. The sting of his injury just adds to it. She'd be so sweet. Her eyes are perfect as they touch him everywhere, drink up his face, drop again to where he's eager for her. "I think about what it would feel like to drive into you, again and again and _again_ when you're not angry. When you're anything but angry."

He can see her other hand clench at her side and he swallows and she mirrors him, shifting hard in place. Her gaze slips down his chest, watches his hand as it moves inexorably. He's hard enough to drill through the wall behind him it feels like. The ache under his heart is no better.

"Drop your leg, Rey. Open yourself, even just a little for me. Let me think about what we're never going to have."

He wonders if that's too far, too much. But she does. Oh, fuck, she does, slides her leg tentatively down from the death clutch against her chest, her eyes wide and hesitant and black. Leans back just a little bit on her hands and she looks away as if she can't watch him while she makes this decision. Her legs twitch, and then hesitantly move apart the tiniest of spaces.

And there's nothing to see, absolutely nothing at all, not even if her breasts are tight and aching for his hands because there's just so much cloth between them, but her body has shifted because he asked her to. He can imagine surging up, three steps, four to shove himself between her legs, put his hands on her waist, pull her into him, _onto_ him rough fast sweet slow and either way he knows, he knows she'll take him to the hilt if she's feeling even half of what he feels.

So wet. So tight. So fucking _ready_ for him.

He closes his eyes and strains. Tightens his hand at the base of his cock because he could come like this, right now, just thinking about it and not yet, please, not yet. He can feel the hair falling in his face as he pants. Spreads his free hand on the wall, fingers wide as if that can help him stay together.

"Fuck, Rey," he shudders. "You could ask me for anything right now and it's yours."

He opens his eyes just in time to catch the sudden twist of longing and an odd, tangled fury on her face and he throws his head back and laughs. "Okay, not that," he manages to garble out. "Anything else though."

And that, suddenly, makes her angry. She sits upright and jerks her knees together, snapping her attention away as if she can deny him, deny them both the deep abiding urge to make this real.

He can see her trying to erase the last few seconds, color again stained like rose on her cheeks. Her fingers bite into whatever she's sitting on, whitening the flesh of her fingertips as she looks around, desperately trying to drag herself back there instead of here.

He resumes stroking himself. "Still, maybe I would," he croons, surprising himself. "Want me to turn up on the Resistance doorstep and surrender? They'll stick a few dozen needles of suppressants in me every couple of hours like clockwork so everyone feels safe enough to spit at my feet, but you can fuck me as much as you like in a jail cell before the execution."

She still doesn't look but he can see the shudder, some hard emotion moving like a storm over her delicate features. Her lip curls back.

"Think about it. At your mercy. Chained down, forced to serve. There just for you, and only for you."

He has no idea what he's saying, spinning it out between them but then the sense of it hits him, the way it would be, could be, the taste of her above him, riding him, knowing that all that's left is fucking her and death and he makes a noise of low excitement and his hand strokes mercilessly hard.

"Rey," he demands breathlessly. "_Rey_. Look. For you. Just for you. Always."

The end hits him like a nova and he arches his shoulders against the wall, digging his heels down, everything flexing as he comes. It splashes on his chest hard once, twice and he digs his other hand into his hair to pull, another pain, imagining it's her, that she's pleased, that the hurt he feels is her nails raking down his chest in encouragement. He milks himself dry, gasping.

Finally he opens his eyes and fuck yes, she's riveted on him, shocked. He runs his hand down his cock a few more times for echo before straightening lazily, feeling the aftershocks in his legs, the wired tremble of release so deep in his belly. His hair is sticking to his face, his lips and he shakes it away. Looks down and he's made a mess of himself.

There's come on the back of his hand and he brings it to his mouth. Sucks it off and watches her.

Her legs are squeezed together so tightly that he aches in sympathy.

"Good luck with the rest of your meeting," he finally manages to get out.

It takes all he's got left to turn and walk back to the fresher. He's bleeding again and he can't even care.


	12. ritual

His eyes are so far away tonight.

Ren burns. There is no other word for it. All she has ever known of him from the moment he exploded in fury across her life has been conflagration. Inferno even, a wildfire with ceaseless, unending appetite. So much rage, so much fear that should be a weakness and so often isn't, so much hunger. His life is a pyre that he burns himself on and if there is a cost she has yet to see him flinch at paying it.

Yet tonight that fire is as banked as she has ever seen it, barely there at all.

Tonight she hugs her knees and watches him dance.

He wears black, always, but tonight the cloth is silk, not armor. His face is bare, his hair longer than she has seen it before, trailing over his shoulders. Sleeveless, his arms are wrapped from wrist to elbow in a network of braided strips and each step he takes the long overtunic flares, catching and discarding light in streamers of thick black embroidery. It seems a work of artisans when Kylo Ren himself has always been to her a brutal fusion of fear and function.

She's thought him beautiful before but this is something else again. It settles like wings in her throat.

His saber pulses as wild as ever, red and screaming but his grip is delicate and he swings it in arabesques that leave aching trails in the air, burning into her eyes. His hands weave in patterns; the motion is unending as he steps carefully from one figure into the next with a liquid grace she has only seen in flashes before on the battlefield. Formal, she decides as she watches. This is ritual. Ceremonial.

It goes on forever and not long enough. When he glides to a gentle stop, both wrists twisting on the hilt to draw a final complex form into the air, she sighs with it.

His dark eyes flicker to her and she tenses, wondering if now is when he'll go back to himself. Yet the peace, whatever it is made of, seems to hold and his mouth doesn't twist into anything ugly for her presence here. He simply looks at her for long moments and although she probes cautiously along the fault lines that run between them, she finds nothing but silence in answer.

"Come here," he says finally. Deep, sleepy. Inviting.

She blinks but then climbs uncertainly to her feet. She dusts imaginary dirt off her legs, hesitating although she couldn't say why exactly.

"Don't worry. Come here," he repeats as if she is a small child that needs coaxing and makes a motion with one hand, indicating the space before him.

"Why?" she asks but she's moving forward under the subtle pressure that is his expectation of her.

"This is something you should know how to do," is the easy, shifting reply. She edges herself in front of him, not sure of what he wants. He sounds so remote, so distant. She doesn't like it.

This close, his saber sounds eerily alive as the harmonics snarl, twining around themselves like cats. It's disturbing and when he steps forward she shifts back defensively, unable to help herself.

"Truce, Rey," he says and this time there's a note of something that might be exasperation. "I won't hurt you. I want to show you this."

Oddly enough, that hit of temper makes her feel better. She knows that from him. She expects that from him. Rey takes a deep breath and spreads her fingers at her sides, trying to let the caution drip out of them. "Okay. Okay. What is it?"

He brings his saber up in one hand so that his face is bisected by the blade, pulling the other to his chest in a loose fist. The red light reflecting in his eyes isn't helping to be honest but she doesn't see anything malicious in them. Yet his shields are so quiet that if she wasn't seeing him with her own eyes, she almost wouldn't even know he was there.

And that makes her frown. Ren is always a roiling mass of emotion, often barely held together by conflicting impulses. Tonight it's like she's looking at a mirror.

"Wait," she says swiftly before he speaks again. "Wait," she repeats quietly.

She edges in closer and then closer again, fingers reaching out in an odd fear.

Skirting the blade is hard. There's something about it that hits on a visceral level, like there are almost words in the crackle if she only knew how to listen. But she reaches past it and carefully brushes her fingertips over his brow, barely touching the line of his eye.

Warmth. The edge of bone, the heat of his skin. He watches her without moving, almost without breathing and he's real, that's real, what she's touching couldn't possibly be anyone else. She knows him, knows the flicker of breath on her wrist. His shields are adamant under her hand but he is himself, not a Force illusion projected into her mind that she realizes she had half convinced herself of. This Ren is strange and unsettling but this is real.

His saber hisses at her and she withdraws her hand in retreat. He still hasn't moved, watching her with that same unknowable expression. She resists the urge to scrub her fingers on her hands, to exorcise the tingle of the impossibly possible contact.

"Sorry. I just wanted to… sorry. You were saying?"

He blinks and suddenly he's stepping forward, his saber hinging into the strike as his wrist flexes.

Except that isn't it. Even as he starts, she falls into the response, reading it on his mind like a shaft of sunlight coming through dark clouds. Shifting to the side, letting the blade move by her in slow motion. His hand comes forward and there's no Force in it, the mimic of the pull that would haul her into the path of the blade. She shifts again, imitating what should be happening and her reply to it, the spin that would take her out of the way with the least amount of effort.

He starts dancing again and she moves with him.

The arabesques stop being decorative and start putting off heat, each of them now revealed as strikes, lunges, ripostes. The flourishes that are meant to disguise the motion of the blade, meant to distract the eye from the hand that is equally deadly. Slowly he moves and slowly she retreats and the blade purrs at them both in approval as she learns.

Slower and slower. He stops and she sees her error, adjusts her limbs, the pattern he wants her to create with him and they move again. He guides her through the steps, correcting without words, showing her how this is done, how to defend, where she could attack had she her own blade. There's nothing else there, no feeling of Kylo, barely any sense of Ren himself. Just this flowing, dreamlike stretch of give and take and motion.

The whip of silk hits her leg at times. Her fingers brush over the cords on his arms. Once her hand is on his shoulder, his on her waist solid and true. This is a caution, his fingers tells her. This move leaves you open here. Guard against it.

She never wants it to end; wants this slow unfolding to last forever and ever until each and every sun in the sky burns out, the sliding closeness of his body, the yielding darkness of his mind against hers. Yet, finally, it does on the last intricate sweep that she understands now is intended to sever, decapitate, and push to the side. She sways with it so slowly it's a sunset. The saber brushes against her skin, his arm curls around her shoulders to turn her into the last spin, the slice across her throat that would end her life, the motion that would move her out of his way as she fell so he could continue forward.

He stills, his chest at her back for two long heartbeats. Then he withdraws a half step and she turns to face him, no longer sure what expression she has, not sure if it's something also that she should guard against. His saber returns to position, tip pointed at the ground, the cross guards at angle towards his chest and the sure knowledge in his mind pouring into hers shutters, fades. She's left alone.

"Good," he says quietly. "Very good. Now put your hand on the hilt."

"Ben?" she asks carefully. And she knows she's right because he doesn't correct her, doesn't flare into any denial at all. The earthquake of the ground he stands on is bedrock tonight and she has no idea why.

"Go ahead." So calm, so deep. This is beyond her but he's waiting for the answer she gave months ago and it seems cruel to pretend she'll give another one now.

She watches herself step forward and wraps her fingers tentatively above his.

She's held his saber for a handful of seconds before, in the heat of battle, her anguish pulsing under her tongue with terror and panic. Now she feels it without any protecting barrier at all.

It's restless, angry. Her skin shocks with the raw energy coursing through the blade, venting furiously through the quillons. She swallows and looks up.

His eyes are still dark, still quiet but there's something starting to move there that wasn't before. Some flickering leviathan just out of sight. But his mind is still calm, still a refuge.

"This is the beginning of Concordance," he says. "Do you feel my blade?"

She nods her head. It feels like... Ren usually does. Out of true, pulsing wildly, striving to remain coherent from one moment to the next. It wants to die and it wants even more fiercely to live. The sound of it crying constantly against itself is both soothing and frightening.

"Could you use this if you had to?"

Her breath catches.

"If you had to, Rey. Could you pick up this blade and use it?"

His voice is still sleepy, still empty, a question without an edge. But it feels like it should have one and she spends longer than she wants to admit trying to find it. Finally she just closes her eyes and lets the blade thrum through her flesh and into her mind. Could she? She feels again all the steps they took, the lesson that was everything of how he fights, the steps that channel all this crackling power into action, into result, into beauty.

'Yes," she says. She could. "If I had to. Yes."

"Well done. Your lesson is over for tonight then. Go to sleep."

"What is Concordance?" she asks as she opens her eyes. "Ben?"

His saber powers down and he's turning away and she has to release her grip on the saber, on him, her hand slipping to her side. He doesn't answer, silk and flicker and some vast unknowable depth she can barely sense let alone look into and he's gone.

_coda_

She can't sleep now. She tries but there is nothing for it but staring up into the dark and feeling a thousand miles away from anything real, anything solid. Eventually she gets up and goes to the mess hall, thinking of coffee, thinking of human faces.

She finds one that she did not expect. She hesitates, warm cup in her hand but finds herself caught in soft brown eyes that smile across the small room, another beckoning hand oddly like the first. She slides onto the bench, feeling adrift and defensive as if she is some sort of traitor, but to who or to what she couldn't say.

"Rey, it's good see you."

"You as well, Gen… Leia," she corrects. "I wouldn't have thought you'd be here so late. Is everything okay?" It's hard not to be worried. It's hard not to notice that Leia is fading, harder still to say nothing about it.

The smile is kind. "As well as can be expected. What has you up so late?"

She opens her mouth and then hesitates. She can't ask. She can't say. There is so much that is impossible to explain and so much that she simply wants to keep untouched for reasons that she's never bothered to fully justify to herself. It's hers. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it's hers. He's hers, somehow.

Still, there are ways and there are ways. _Scavenger girl_ she hears again. _Always looking for your advantage_.

"There's something about tonight," she finally says, feeling out the words slowly. "I feel it and I don't know what it is. Something different."

And the thing is, she knows Leia is Force sensitive. She has only to open her eyes to the currents and her commanding officer will be there, bright and shining and present. But there's no sharpness to it. She's never felt Leia do more than rest on the waves. If Ren is a ravening fire eating across the landscape, Leia is a single lantern bobbing on an ocean.

But as she sits there she can feel the light expanding, swelling, and Rey swallows and looks at her fingers as she sits at a small, dingy table on a backwater world, clutching a cooling cup of coffee. Lets it break over her, keeping herself still both inwards and outwards. The walls around them fade into the background, enclosed in this bubble of calm, a tentative peace that feels so familiar that she can't help but bow to it again for the second time tonight.

There is no hurt here either, no terrible intent. Only peace. Only an aching calm. But she can't break out of it.

For the first time she's confronted with the bone-deep understanding that while she might somehow be able to touch Vader's grandson across the stars, she also sits next to his daughter.

"Oh, Rey," the other woman says softly, "I'm sorry. I should have known you'd feel it too, I should have warned you. For as much good as it would have done."

"What is it?" She makes the mistake of looking up to catch Leia's sad gaze and it hits her out of nowhere, that Leia has Ben's eyes. No, other way around but still, she's caught. Softer, older, but the same shape, the same color, the same intentness that seems to look right through everything.

Leia reaches out and strokes Rey's hair with gentle fingers. "The Force is troubled. Luke's temple burned tonight, so long ago now. I should have mentioned something earlier but… well, I don't know. I suppose it just didn't occur to me."

Oh. Rey looks down at her hands, clutched around the cheap mug. There's a divot missing in the handle and it stands out for no reason at all. Feels Leia's hand on her hair, feels the comfort in it, offered freely. But it makes no sense.

"How?" she finally manages to ask. "I mean, why does… why does the Force even care? Millions died to Starkiller alone, let alone everything else the First Order..." She scrubs her face. "No, I mean, I'm sorry, every life is important, I know that. I don't know what I'm saying."

Leia sighs and the light glows a little brighter, a little warmer still. It sinks into Rey's bones like an elixir. "The Force doesn't care in the slightest. But my son does." Leia's hand stops stroking then and her eyes seem to no longer be looking at Rey but at something so far away that it's like the light has yet to reach it. And she's seen that exact look, that exact distance oh, so recently.

She feels like a traitor but she still says nothing.

Finally Leia's eyes focus again and her smile is compassionate, understanding, and oddly sharp. "What you're feeling… what we're both feeling is my son's grief. Or an echo of it. Somewhere under the monster he's become, this remains. Everyone with any sensitivity will be probably awake tonight even if they don't know exactly why."

Rey puts a hand to her mouth this time, to guard. Automatic reaction to hide, keep her face hidden, to hold back her expression. Leia sighs and drops her hand, putting it in her lap where her fingers twist together. Her shoulders straighten and Rey sees something of who she must have been when she was younger, a woman raised to rule more than a few handfuls of people, more than the last leader of a desperate cause.

"It doesn't happen every year anymore. I think he's forgetting." The older woman takes a breath. "But that he mourns tonight gives me hope. Isn't that strange?" she says. "I know that my son is gone. He's killed so many. Killed his father, killed Han, _my_ Han. He's done things that no one should be able to forgive." And there is so much grief there that even second hand, third hand removed it flutters against Rey's heart, making it hurt.

She seems to run out of words and Rey impulsively puts her hand on Leia's clasped grip. "He's not gone. I know that Ben is still there, somewhere." Black silk, a mind bent on imparting a lesson, on teaching of all things; a vast darkness untouched by fire.

"Is he?" Leia asks. "Tomorrow this feeling will be gone like it never was. And next year maybe it won't come again and that will be the end of it. And Kylo Ren and the First Order will keep marching over planets until they have them all."

"The Resistance will oppose them," she replies automatically.

"Yes," Leia smiles. "We will." Leia moves her fingers and then pats her hand. "You should try and sleep."

What else can she say to that? Twice now sent to her bed as if she is a child. Two sets of brown eyes and while she loves only one of them, the other kisses her brow gently and she submits to the wisdom of it.


	13. void

_i dreamed this, it was very surreal. what if kylo ren actually was stupid enough to surrender himself to the resistance?_

* * *

"Stop! Kylo, no!"

She spreads her fingers out helplessly. She not even sure what she's imploring him, them, everyone to do but all she can think over and over and over again is _be calm be calm please just everyone be calm don't move it's still okay_ and somehow it seems to be working because nobody is moving, nobody is doing anything, nobody is even _breathing_ anymore, least of all her.

He doesn't break her gaze. He's gone completely still after that one explosive, frightening burst; carved like a shadow against the gray tarmac with the dust and sand and dirt of the Resistance colors clustered around him in counterpoint. Black hair, black eyes, black everywhere and the Force is boiling around him so hard that she wonders in a hiccup of time how she can even still see him through the distortion. But nothing is moving. Nothing worse has happened. Everyone is still okay and that includes her and that includes him and that includes everybody else who have all frozen where they were shoved away, the one man sprawled on his back with the metal restraints still clutched in his hand and this is absolutely and utterly ridiculous and then she looks again at the maelstrom happening around him that nobody else can see and she swallows her rising panic.

"Kylo, please. You have to let them put the cuffs on." This time she sees his chest rise and fall and something terrible spears through the Force, something that tastes of rejection and something else that sings of retaliation. "You have to do it," she soothes. Her fingers are still outstretched as if that alone could hold it all back. "You have to let them do it. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

He's locked so hard into himself that she can't tell what he's thinking or if he's even thinking at all. He's made it this far but something about the shackles is where he's balked and whatever it is, she can't read it beyond the clench of his jaw.

Then he nods, once and sharp and straightens from the half crouch he'd fallen into. The Force settles a little and she can see him trying to calm down, his face trying to lapse back into impassivity but failing with the tightness around his eyes, the lip that keeps trying to curl.

The blasters that were half raised moments ago are now locked on target and the worst part is, she can't blame them. The two men with the shock sticks edge back in again, slide closer and he looks at her and she can see it in his eyes and she has to nod, this is okay, this is still okay, they knew this was going to be necessary but why the _kriff_ someone had ordered this done on the platform as soon as they'd landed is beyond her but they have to do it, they'd both known this was going to happen at some point.

She keeps holding his eyes as the man he'd Force pushed gets back cautiously to his feet, never let it be said the Resistance lacks courage, and tries again shakily to put the handcuffs on.

This time it seems like it's going to be okay. Kylo doesn't so much as flinch this time as the first silver band snaps on.

It's like being shoved underground. Rey exhales with a whimper. She grabs her own wrist hard enough to bruise in impotent reaction to something that isn't even happening to her and she brings it to her chest as if that will somehow help, somehow restore function. She can feel it. Choking. Smothering. Half severed suddenly from air and light and _life_.

Her mouth is as dry as the desert she came from and his eyes still burn into hers but this time, this time he does nothing to stop it. His arm doesn't move. His fingers don't even flex.

In that heartbeat the jailer brings his other hand up and snaps on the second cuff.

The Force currents howling around him cut off instantly. It's so jarring she actually takes a step forward, falling into the void of it.

She knows there's air still and she knows she's still breathing but it feels like she's not really doing either because where there was Kylo, where there was _Ben_ now there's nothing, nothing at all, an utter emptiness where there used to be so much presence and her heart is beating faster and faster and faster.

The look on his face crumbles because whatever she's feeling, it's from the _outside_ and he's on the _inside _of that horrific vacuum and she takes another step forward as if it will somehow help if she can just get _closer_. Somebody grabs her arm and starts to pull her back.

His head jerks back and his fingers grip into fists. His breath hisses out, shockingly loud and his eyes are suddenly nothing but black terror. He doesn't even look human anymore. She can all but see him reaching, trying to claw his way back to himself through the chains.

And the world answers.

Dust leaps into the air. There's a delicate tremble under her heels. His hands clench again and the ground shakes once more, harder, and somebody curses off to the side.

Then one of the men with a shock stick strikes him with it and he howls in pain as he drops to his knees and the ground _cracks_ around him as he falls. The man on the other side hits him as well as in frightened solidarity and she hears somebody yell _get the collar on get the collar on now_ and _how the fuck is he even doing that_ and Kylo screams again as the shock sticks flare again in tandem and there's somebody against his back fumbling and she sees silver against his black, black hair and something wraps like a snake around his throat and everything just —

— stops.

There are hands on her. Hard. Tight. She strains against them, she doesn't even know who they are and they're saying things and she doesn't care. Kylo's on his knees and she's looking right at him and he's not there, there's nothing there at all. Hard metal on his hands, on his neck, a shadow in the shape of a man kneeling where there used to be _everything_.

She reaches desperately into the Force where he burned so fiercely and there's no answer. There isn't even a whisper of an answer. An utter, aching void and she reaches again and there's still _nothing_. In desperation she wraps her fist around her connection to him, the one thing that she had always, always believed inviolate even as she'd raged against it and _there is nothing_.

She can hear herself panting, high and pained. She didn't know. She didn't know it would be like this and he pulls himself up onto his heels, shaking the hair out of his face, teeth bared and snarling but there is no answering fury anywhere to be felt except in her heart.

And then he gets hit again with the shock stick for something as stupid as moving and that everyone around him is afraid, will always be afraid, and he arches but this time no sound escapes at all, not even a whistle of breath. She screams for both of them as his eyes close, the lines of his throat taut with strain and she knows he's setting himself to endure without sound, without complaint. She knows how pain moves through his body because she's felt this before, every time he's been hurt, been punished, been _corrected_ with his blood twisted to lightning but now this is her side doing this to him, her _friends_, and this is all her fault, he told her this would happen and she can't find him _anywhere_.

"No! No! Leave him alone! _Kylo!_ "

She knows how because he does. One step to blast everybody back, everybody away, they won't do this to him, she won't let them touch him again, she wants him _back_, wants all of him _back_ and she reaches out with both hands and digs her fingers into the air and she knows she's bruising his wrists but she wants those monstrous things _off_ and she crushes the metal, furious and panicked, digs again and pulls harder and finally they start to crack and she sobs with relief that she can feel him boiling up through those narrow slivers. She reaches up to her neck and he reaches up to his in mirror and together they grab the collar and tear it off.

She's running even as he staggers back to his feet, as he shatters the handcuffs in one convulsive strike and and he grabs her hard into his arms and he's _there_, he's all _there_, she can feel him all around her, heat and body and mind and breath and chaos and fire and she sinks her fingers into his flesh even as he sinks into her mind and she sees the silver on his wrists as a child when they'd tried to control him even then by cutting him off from himself and he'd tried, he'd tried to do it for her but it was too much, too much memory, too much fear, and he'd panicked and he couldn't do it, so much silence, can't feel can't feel _can't feel_ where is it if they try again he'll rip them _apart_ and she sinks her hands into his hair and never again never again never again.

She's stroking him over and over, fingers on his face, her forehead pressed to his, his hands clutching at her hips, waist, running in agony up her back as he assures himself that she is here, still here, still bright and alive and blazing with light in his mind, not empty, not _gone_ and she realizes they've sunk down again, knees to the rough ground with his face hard in her neck and she's mostly crawled into his lap with the voracious need to touch.

She looks up a thousand years later, blinking the tears away to find people are staring awkwardly at them.

"So. Yeah. Guess that's not going to work now, is it?"

And she half laughs because that's Poe sounding rueful, just like the last however long its been hadn't actually happened and she could just kiss him with wobbling relief for how normal he sounds when she feels anything but. There's even trembling amusement sliding through Kylo simply because of how Poe's voice made her feel and they agree somewhere that they both like the pilot for trying but they can't stay this vulnerable.

Somehow they untangle just enough to stand again, his chest to her back as shield and comfort, one arm hooked around her chest to keep them in contact, fingers biting into her shoulder. She feels him looking for the men with the shock sticks because if they have to fight they are going to be the first to go down and she digs her fingers around his wrist, skin to skin and assents.

If they try and cage him again away from her, she'll drop them all where they stand and she really, really hopes it won't be necessary.

"No," she says breathily. "It's definitely not. Sorry."

His breath is in her hair and she feels the savage burn of him flaring out in all directions as she threads herself into him again and he rumbles his agreement without words.


	14. dust

The sky is an unsettling shade of rust and the air here is way too thin; it scrapes in her lungs like fingers, difficult to hold on to, barely on the edge of tolerance. Crouched on her heels Rey falls back into as much calm as she can, tells herself that no, she isn't going to suffocate as much as it feels like she going to. Just breathe deeper, draw in slower. This is the easy part.

Yes. Absolutely. This is the easy part.

Launching herself out of cover in a dead sprint, she blocks a flurry of blaster fire, sending the energy bolts pinging off into the high walls. She has no idea where it's coming from at this point other than above which isn't helping her regulate her breathing at all. They've been over this ground more than once in the last hour, both sides surging back and forth in the claustrophobic streets and she's in as much danger of twisting her ankle on broken masonry at this point as she is at being taken out between the shoulder blades by a shot she doesn't feel coming.

She barrels for the cluster of Resistance fighters taking cover behind a tangle of overturned vendor carts in the intersection ahead, aiming for Finn a few meters back. He's actually trying to tuck his long frame into a recessed doorway like he knows what he's doing and it's not really working. Stormtroopers really don't seem to have been drilled in avoidance techniques and it's not like Poe's been much of a good influence that way. Although quite frankly neither has she.

She nearly trips over a hunk of debris and in trying to save herself, manages to drag her foot through a pile of shredded cloth that wraps around her boot. Stupid. Karking. She kicks at it, hopping awkwardly. More blaster fire flashes over her head and she yelps, rolling forward and tearing herself free more by panic than intent.

She scrambles to Finn and manages to somehow jam herself behind him in the alcove, crouching by his knees to make the smallest target possible.

"Rey! Where's the rest of the squad?" he yells at her.

"Uh," she replies intelligently. "Coming? They're coming! Got separated… somewhere." She starts scanning all the rooftops she can see from this angle. C'mon. Where are the kriffing bastards. She knows they're up there, they were just shooting at her. "They went right, I went left trying to pull fire and it definitely, definitely worked. They should be right behind me."

Her friend wheezes and her own chest spasms in sympathy. His hair is smeared with the gray dust that's everywhere and his thick jacket is scraped in more than a few places, shredded along the shoulder patch which is barely holding on at this point. Poe will no doubt have some pointed words for both of them after this.

"I thought Jedi were supposed to be all about the battle plan!" He sticks his blaster out without looking and squeezes off a few shots further down the street.

Something deep whumps nearby. They both duck. Nothing comes down on top of their heads this time which is good progress but they both gain another layer of dust.

"Next Jedi I see, I'll definitely ask how the battle plan is coming along."

"We have to be getting close. Is he here yet?"

She gulps and the stingy air in her chest squeezes even tighter. No need to ask who _he_ is. She hates that even that much makes her flinch. No. No, she's got this, she can do this. It's the whole reason she's here after all, running up and down these streets in a weird game of touch-me-not with a side dish of try-and-find-me.

"Yes. He's on the ground at least."

She'd made the mistake of opening her eyes to the force currents awhile ago. She'd slammed her shields shut a heartbeat later and hasn't dared crack them since.

There's a clatter further down the street in entirely the wrong direction and she and Finn both whirl but this time it's actually more Resistance fighters and two squads at that. Absolutely the best thing she's seen today. They have to be getting close to the end of this if Leia has ordered that many to start pushing forward, making it look like there's an actual offensive going on in this area.

"Took you guys long enough," Finn yells as they go by to take up covering positions for the next push. "Okay. Okay. We ready, Rey?"

She nods and takes a slow, deep breath. She is not going to run out of air. She is not going to choke.

"Absolutely. Completely ready."

Finn grins down at her, fierce and scared at the same time and it's, so, well, _Finn_ with his smile so white in his grimy face that she can't help but grin back. They can do this. They can totally do this.

* * *

The thing they never tell you, she decides, is that playing the rabbit to the wolf is utterly nerve wracking on the rabbit.

She can see Ren now, a black figure striding across what probably counts as the town square just going by the fact there's a central fountain in it even if its not currently working, his saber engaged but lax in his hand. He's so casually arrogant that even fifty feet away and with blaster fire howling everywhere he's doing nothing to protect himself that she can see. That frightens her more than anything else. He just keeps walking, his long legs flashing across the distance, kicking up so much dust so that it almost looks like he's moving through a fog.

In a minute he's going to disappear through the smashed archway on the other side and she'll lose him to the twisted, narrow streets and no matter what, she absolutely does not want to have to take him on there.

She takes a deep breath and triggers her comm. "I have him in sight. Are you ready?" Please tell me you're ready, she breathes.

Maybe somewhere she's hoping for a reprieve. It doesn't happen. "Affirmative. We're nearly through the door. Engage at will and may the Force be with you."

She blows out a breath, sucking it back in slowly. She can do this. She is not going to suffocate. She just has to keep him occupied and distracted until she gets the comm that they've gotten through and they can all beat a hasty and well deserved retreat. She's done way more than that before with a whole lot less to work with.

She shakes herself, grips her saber, and drops her shields.

It hasn't gotten any better. Ren is in a _mood_ and it howls over her like a banshee, red and furious. She ducks from reaction alone even as she sees him jolt to a black shadowed stop, turning unerringly in her direction.

"Kylo Ren!" she yells, just to make it formal. "Your mother misses you!"

It's extremely unlikely he heard her from that far away but it definitely helps kick start her heart. She slips from one wall to the next, making sure that she's visible while she does it and the game of try-and-find-me officially collapses into phase two which is don't-think-just-chase.

Fortunately and unfortunately it turns out Kylo is absolutely on board with the Resistance distraction plan, bringing to the table a vengeance entirely his own.

She always forgets how _fast_ he is. In less than a minute she's running, desperately hauling in handfuls of anything she can reach through the Force just to keep out of his way, leaping to the top of the half broken walls to slash down, spinning behind obstacles and doing her absolute utmost to stay on her feet and ahead of him.

He Force grabs for her legs, her clothing, even her hand to wrench her saber out of alignment. Once she thinks she feels his fingers tug gently on her hair from meters away and that is both frightening and heart stoppingly distracting and if she had more time and actual oxygen she'd hyperventilate about it but that just isn't going to happen. She thought she'd have to taunt him into this but she barely has breath for the fight itself in this attenuated air. If he's labouring too, she can't tell. Maybe his mask does more than just conceal his face - not like she'd know and it's not like she can stop and ask.

She loses him behind a half wall, dodges around a pedestal higher than her shoulder that probably held a massive statue at some point and suddenly her saber is up and locked with his as he rounds the other corner, having somehow anticipated her. She sobs with strain and starts backpedaling.

"Ready to give up yet?" he asks. He's so strong, driving her back with the power of his body alone this time, his saber shrieking in her ear.

"Never!" she spits out.

She ducks down, disengaging and slashing for his legs. He leaps over it with ease and they're back on again.

"Finn," she shouts, hoping her comm is still on. "Finn, I could use some help here!"

"Trying!" she hears in a crackle of static.

"Ah. Calling for the traitor? You do realize that if he's abandoned his post once, he'll do it again?" Kylo spins and the saber arcs down in a blaze that she just barely dodges. She lunges and forces him back a few feet, slicing off a few inches of a fluttering sleeve which is moderately satisfying. There's stairs nearby leading up to a mostly intact pathway and she races up them, trying to get to higher ground.

"Finn is my friend! He wouldn't do that!"

Blaster energy streaks towards Kylo Ren and he half turns to meet it, thrusting out a hand. She slashes and manages to actually score a hit on his forearm in his moment of split attention and he hisses at her, his mask distorting it into an animal sound.

"Yes, he would. He's a coward."

"You don't know _anything_ about him!"

Blaster fire rings out again and this time she's not sure if it's meant for Kylo or for her and they both break apart to dodge the incoming bolts.

"I know what you're trying to do, Rey," he growls at her, obviously shifting tactics. She hammers down at him as he closes back in and he blocks and blocks again, surging up. Kriff, he's relentless. He slides behind a mostly intact column and blaster fire that she hopes is coming from her backup squad this time pings off it, clipping more pieces of masonry onto the ground. She's going to twist an ankle for sure.

"Do you?" she pants.

"I pay attention to the briefings," he remarks cryptically. "Hux is very good at them. And he has a startling grasp of tactics."

"I remember him. Your rabid attack dog."

"Snoke's actually. And the word was _cur_ but still, he's remarkably effective once you get him pointed in the right direction." Rey yips as she spins out from a heavy strike aimed at taking her out at the ribcage. "He operates best on a short leash."

The unrelenting attacks are taking their toll on her lungs and she's gasping harder and harder for breath. Ren spins his saber and deflects more blaster fire, starting to push her backwards once more, father away from the central area.

"Well, if he's so all knowing, what am I doing?" she throws back, gulping air. "Other than working on carving up your mask to get to the other side of your ugly face."

"Oh, Rey," and she hates that tone in his voice, modulated as it is. Half purr, all prickle. "You don't think my face is ugly. That's not what you think at all. You stare at it much too much when you see me."

"Well, you like to stare at me too!" she fires back. She goes low again and this time he's the one who has to leap up onto a tumble of blocks to get out of the way. That's something at least and she mentally scores one for herself.

He laughs and she hates that they've fallen back into it again, this half caress, half anger, half again something else again exchange of words. She should be concentrating on what she's doing, not on how his voice keeps digging at her under her skin, half touching her heart. Their sabers are heating up what little air there is and everything is starting to smell like scorch and ozone.

He launches himself at her and she spins and spins again to get out of the way, sabers clashing.

"I do like looking at you," he agrees. "And I always will. But this has gone on long enough. I told you, I know what you're doing. Hux said you'd be the one sent to search me out, keep me occupied while the rest of your friends did the important work. And here I am, following orders for once and pleasing both of you."

Her heart freezes with cold in her chest and then beats twice as hard. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"But the timeline has shifted and I have to go now."

"What? Kylo?"

His mask rumbles. "You have no idea how much I love it when you say my name. But enough. You have it so wrong, Rey. We lured the Resistance here, you know. Fed your contact the information on this old Rebel cache and bribed them not to check too closely on the accuracy of the information. There's nothing for you here and your people are walking into a trap. And you? You think you're keeping me here but what's really happening is that you're not _there_."

"Wh… what?"

She stutters to a near stop, and she shouldn't but of all things she was not expecting that. His saber flashes out and then back again in a reverse grip and she ducks instinctively and only then realizes she's fallen for the feint as his hand lashes out.

She feels the comm tucked behind her ear ripped away and she cries out in anger and fear.

"Let me make this even worse for you."

She has no idea how he does it but he's suddenly just there, the line of his body jammed hard against hers, pushing her completely off balance. She cries out as she starts to fall. His fingers impact her upper arm, yanking her roughly upright and he spins her into his embrace, her back hard and bruising against his front.

His saber cuts out and the sudden silence is deafening. His mask nuzzles just behind her ear. The unyielding metal is cold and his body is flaring hot even through the armor and she will hate herself forever for this, but she arrests somewhere between both sensations.

"Is this where where I bite you?" he whispers. "Or you bite me?"

She kicks backwards, her boot impacting hard on his shin and he laughs even as he shoves her away with a hand between her shoulder blades. She whirls back with her heart in her throat, raising her saber to wipe the smirk off the face she can't see but he's stepped back out of range and he's not even looking at her now, his gloved hand outstretched.

She hears the high pitched yelp a heartbeat later and horrified understanding kicks in. She twists hard on one heel to look back down the stairs he's chased her up. Away from the rest of the fight. Away from everyone else.

Finn. Somehow he's grabbed Finn from wherever her friend was shooting from, pulled him out of cover and Forced him stumbling into open ground. Ren waves his hand again abruptly and Finn jerks forward, this time completely losing balance to skid on his knees and he's unprotected, vulnerable. She sees him try to scramble up and away, clutching his blaster and Ren just crooks his finger and knocks him onto his back farther into the courtyard.

"Let him go, _let him go!_" she yells. There's sudden tears in her eyes, making it hard to see and there's a clawing in her lungs that has nothing to do with the thin air. Any second now somebody is going to put a bolt through his abused jacket, right through his generous heart and Finn will be dead and what will she tell Poe? "Ren, no, _please_."

"As you wish," he says calmly and she hates him so fiercely in this moment it's like her skin is on fire with it. Her mouth is dust and ashes. "You can save your friend. Or you can run to warn your comrades, hoping you're still in time to keep them alive. Or you can keep me here. But you can only do one of those things, so choose, Rey. Choose who dies."

"I hate you," she whispers because they both already know what she's going to do, as if there was any choice in this at all. Her heart cries out for the ones who were cracking the door, who walked into whatever terrible thing was waiting for them because somebody, somewhere sold them out and here she is, played for a fool by a voice she hears in both her dreams and her nightmares. "I hate you so much, Kylo Ren."

"Good," he says and he steps back once more, turning to walk away with his back unprotected again because he's just that sure and void take him into the deep dark, he's not _wrong_. "It will make everything so much easier when I finally bring you to heel."

She raises her saber and charges back down the stairs, yelling at Finn to keep his head down.


	15. plan

When he gets the stammered report that Ren is currently occupied tearing up a rather critical part of the flight deck, he spends a delightful few seconds contemplating if he could, in fact, just flood the entire landing bay with soporific gas. He also considers pinching the bridge of his nose. Unfortunately he's on the command deck at the moment and his crew are everywhere to catch him at it.

The plan had worked flawlessly. _His_ plan. Had worked _flawlessly_. The operation had been a complete and utter success and the pitiful Resistance hadn't taken a single thing of use out of the encounter. While his ground forces hadn't inflicted anywhere near the material damage that he'd personally hoped for, there's no reason to be a petulant child about it. Which is what Ren is apparently doing on the lower deck. For no reason at all. _Again_.

He purses his lips, stares at the ceiling and talks himself out of the gas. For one thing, he doesn't know if Ren has his mask on. If he doesn't and the gas works, it begs the much larger question of whether, at this very moment in time, he's willing to commit himself to whatever happens afterwards. If Ren goes down and then comes back up again even more furious… well. Or Ren could go down and he makes absolutely sure the man doesn't get back up again, but then there's the rest of the follow up murders that would immediately need to follow and the associated fallout of those since Ren hasn't even had the decency to sequester himself away from prying eyes.

A coup is, after all, an all or nothing proposition and one he's not even convinced anymore is in his best interests. Current problem aside, his working relationship with the former warlord has been oddly... productive. Point in fact, his plan had been conceived, executed and resolved brilliantly. Ren himself had even done his part without going off track.

And it's all supposing, of course, that the Supreme Leader is even susceptible to air borne pathogens in the first place or whether he'd just intuit the attack out of the deck plating patterns, causing even more of a logistical nightmare about the whole thing.

Hux adds it to his mental list of things to check into though. Being able to down Ren at a moment's notice would be so incredibly satisfying.

Still, the issue isn't going to solve itself by standing around. Well, technically it will absolutely solve itself when Ren runs out of things to smash apart but then the damage will be completely unchecked and according to the underling who is still quivering in front of him waiting to be dismissed, that's a bit of an issue. Hence why somebody closer to the problem took the initiative to pass it upstairs to the one and only officer who might be willing and able to do something about it.

Hux nods off his command to the on-deck lieutenant who has enough control over himself to not look relieved that he's not the one being sent, clasps his hands behind his back, and goes to deal with it.

When he exits the hoverlift he doesn't even have to ask. Ren has definitely outdone himself this time. The deep gouges he steps over on the deck alone are enough to make Hux wince with the astronomical cost of replacing each and every damaged plate and he can actually still hear the man's beast of a weapon flailing around.

"Supreme Leader," he calls loudly as he gets into what seems an appropriate range. "A word with you, if you please."

Hux is forced to watch yet another essential control surface meets its violent end. At this rate, he's probably going to have to decommission this entire bay for weeks while they rewire everything critical. He waits. And waits. And waits.

"If you're _quite_ done," he hisses out eventually when it looks like this isn't anywhere close to winding down. That, oddly enough, gets a response. Ren stops swinging for a moment to look over his shoulder and yes, he does still have his mask on. Pity.

"What do you want, Hux?"

Since the red monstrosity is currently not being pointed at him specifically, he makes the cautious decision to get a little closer. Yelling at the Supreme Leader in an open area where technically anyone could overhear would have been unthinkable in previous regimes. That he edges closer to it everyday with Ren is something he should probably spend more time planning for.

On the other hand, the volatile rages of his current superior have completely cleared the surrounding area and while there are likely mechanical listening devices, those recordings are easily found later and scrubbed back to their component atoms.

"What I want is for you to stop destroying incredibly vital equipment," he replies as reasonably as he can be expected to. "In case you haven't noticed, the part that is currently offending you controls who has command access to this docking bay. As it's now slag, someone will be spending a lot of unnecessary time trying to determine if every three drink smuggler in the local area can now just fly through the open port of this dreadnought like they have an engraved invitation to visit, or if absolutely _nobody _can which is objectively worse. And tritanium deck plating is _expensive_."

Ren turns away and presumably actually looks at the swath of fitfully sparking destruction but that's conjecture on Hux's part. In better news though, the saber disengages and suddenly his ears are no longer being assaulted.

"Thank you," he says stiffly.

Out of nowhere Ren's hand extends and Hux finds himself dragged unceremoniously closer by invisible fingers around his throat. He chokes, clawing ineffectually at the grip that isn't technically there. He ends up hanging an arm length away and it's only then that the silver mask turns back.

"Supreme Leader," he manages to choke out.

For a hot second the pressure on his throat increases and his vision starts to spark.

"Your plan," Ren growls, "worked perfectly."

Then just as abruptly he's released and he staggers on his feet. Bastard. Kriffing Force wielding bastard runt of a bantha. Maybe he should have gone for the gas. "And somehow that's a _problem_, Supreme Leader?" he croaks out.

"Yes."

"_How?_"

He doesn't mean it to sound plaintive but there it is. He tugs sharply on the bottom of his tunic to pull out the wrinkles in compensation. The mask just looks at him and Hux looks back and decides after a few seconds that no, there's technically no one watching this so there is no reason that he has to be the one to capitulate.

By any sane standard, this makes no sense at all. They won this skirmish. They won _decisively_ with multiple ongoing benefits. And still, going by the damage all around them, it's very possible that the First Order might come out on the losing end of this particular engagement. Which is ludicrous. Which Ren needs to understand.

And for a moment, standing his ground seems to go his way. Ren finally hooks his lightsaber to his belt and starts to move. Hux turns to the side to let him pass, half starting his usual bow.

Somehow that doesn't happen. Ren walks right into his personal space and Hux finds himself being pushed back, the other man's body crowding his. He steps back quickly and then keeps moving back in an odd panic only to find himself somehow jammed up against a corner of the mutilated wall, something uncomfortable sticking into his shoulders.

He blanks out as armor impacts, causing its own line of wreckage down the length of their bodies. Once again shoulder to shoulder with Ren's bulk looming over him and this time he's got absolutely nowhere to go. He flinches from the contact but whatever it is he's pressed against tells him that's not a good idea either as the ragged points of metal start to dig warningly into flesh.

His hand twitches, thinking incoherently of pushing Ren _off_ and _away_ but then his mind instantly shies away from even the idea of it. Yet the alternative is permitting this contact.

He's suddenly excruciatingly aware that they are very much alone.

"Why," he grits out finally between clenched teeth as Ren continues to say nothing at all, "do you keep doing this?"

The answer is low. "Because I hate being touched. But you? You hate it more. But for more interesting reasons than I do."

"Just what are you trying to prove?"

The mask tilts and Hux can see pieces of himself reflected in the wavering bands. "I don't know," is the eventual answer. "But your mind wants desperately to scatter when I do this, just like hers does. And I need control of _something_ before I do worse than slice apart something that can't scream back."

He stops breathing. Finds he's looked away because he is not going to let Ren see whatever expression is on his face because he's not even sure himself what it would be. Kriffing. Bastard runt. Of a _bantha_.

It takes a moment before he realizes that Ren is laughing silently, a slight tremble of the body hard against his. He swallows and finds that while he still can't look back, that sliver of humanity helps. He has no idea what is going on with Ren and for his own peace of mind, he really shouldn't ask. Snoke was easier to manage. At least his former superior confined himself to public humiliation and the capricious application of pain instead of… whatever this is.

It certainly can't be sexual. Ren has never given any indication he even knows what bodies can do together, as chaste as a temple virgin if rumors are to be believed. A different sort of management tactic? Ren has never been one for outright torture, after all. He's certainly discomfited by this and has no idea what's an appropriate response to deal with it. Putting his hands on Ren is out of the question. Asking what the point of it is seems like an unwise decision as well.

Hux decides that having this conversation with himself while Ren is breathing down his dress collar is probably a bad idea. Is his mind being read right now? Would he even know? Ren's done it before, fire and pain and the sickening feeling of utter exposure but all he can feel right now is the clench in his gut that has more to do with Ren's scent and the realization that he knows what bodies do even if Ren doesn't.

"Are you feeling in control now, Supreme Leader?" he finally manages to ask and his voice at least is calm, even a little bored. He keeps his hands loosely at his side.

The laughter stops but Ren still doesn't move away.

"No," he finally says and the register is lower than it was before and the modulator adds ghost echoes to it which prickles the hair on the back of his neck. "But I do feel better. Thank you, General Hux. I hadn't realized you were that involved with the bottom line expenditures for this ship."

"I am involved in everything to do with this ship. And all the others like it. And… you're welcome. I trust next time you are angry that something is going well, you can possibly pick something that costs less to replace in celebration? A conference room perhaps? Chairs are plentiful."

"I'll consider it," he replies after a moment and finally, finally he steps back. Hux takes his first full breath in what feels like forever with what he hopes is very carefully disguised relief. "Perhaps just to please you again, I will."

"Just to… _what?_" His mind blanks out again and this is infuriating. Ren's temper is something he has dealt with before and will deal with again. Ren's capacity to ignore everything that doesn't personally relate to his often opaque goals is something he can and does plan around. But this, this, whatever it is, matches absolutely no known patterns. He'd written off the man's actions when he'd gone to confront his killers on a leash as an intimidation tactic but this is the second time he's been forced to deal with Ren at extremely close and personal range and each time, he's just _stood_ there. Breathing at him. Making it hard to think.

And Ren doesn't explain. Simply turns on his heel and leaves.

Hux realizes he's clenching one fist over and over again and comes to the agonizingly slow conclusion that he really should have pushed the man off him. Maybe he'd have been punished for the retaliation but it would at least have made _sense_.


	16. liar

He lies to himself.

When he can. When he can get away with it. When the pressure inside is so much greater than the pressure out. When whatever part of him that assesses the threat in everything chooses that for this space of time, in a discrete partition of thought and will, that he needs equilibrium more than he needs safety.

He lies to himself and tells himself he dreams.

He's in his quarters, wearing battle armor and the weight is comfortable, familiar, and if he could he would never remove it. This is who he is. This is who he will always be. Ozone is a sharp tang clinging to the fabric, to his hair, to his spirit. The very air split apart in accusation of what he's willing to do.

She stares at him and her face is anguish, the tears that come so easily to her already starting to gather. He knows it's because she can see his face now, a catalyst she rejects when she can but cannot always refuse, not here, not now. He dreams and she is abraded and angry because those things also come easily to her and he feels all of it running over his exposed skin like water. He has hurt her again. He will always hurt her. This is who they are.

When she strikes his chest with a shaking fist, he can't feel it. The sound she makes is as broken and fierce as a hawk and he hears every one of his sins echoing in her cry. And she hits him again and again and again, each beat a dull thud over his heart of what she feels and the armor absorbs as it is meant to. To keep him alive against attack, to deflect what would do him harm. She hits him and he feels her hand bruising against the plates and he looks up into blackness and keeps his own at his sides.

He dreams and takes her sorrow into himself because he caused it and it rightfully belongs to him. A choice that was no choice at all; a plethora of death for her to pick from like a bridal bouquet and he would do it again because that is who they are. This is who he is. It is only here, divided from reality by his will, that he can accept her grief in the silence that is all he has the right to offer.

It is only when she has stopped punishing her flesh against what cannot yield that he folds her so carefully into his arms. Slides his mouth over her hair as she cries for those she could not save and tells himself, tells her that they dream, that this place belongs to nowhere and everywhere and if he could undo it, undo himself, he would.

Her fingers open finally over his armored heart as she rests against him. He feels that as he did not feel the rest and he is bruised and bleeding for her then, smelling of dust and despair even as she smells of consecration.

He is sorry. He will always be sorry for all that he is, all that he was and all that he has yet to be. Her tears wash him away.

So he lies and he dreams and he tells her if he could somehow turn back all the stars for her, oh, he would try.


	17. cui bono

The next time their link tears itself open, he's awake and in control. And so, apparently, is she.

She looks better. Calmer anyways. The tear tracks on her face are long gone and the strain he still sees hides under what could easily be mistaken for quiet exhaustion. He doubts anyone else would notice. This time she's crouched on one knee, a long carbon chisel in her hands and black grime streaks her face and clothing. Working on something it seems.

He sees her dart a look at him out of the corner of her eye so he takes another bite out of his bowl, and flicks the page on his datapad to advance.

She scrapes the tool a few times on something overhead that he can't see, muscles in her forearms flexing but its a half hearted effort at best. She seems to realize it too and tries again, harder.

The minutes drag on as she chips away at metal and residue and after three pages where he realizes he has no idea what he just read, he considers leaving. The bond opens whenever it wants to but this is much too soon after last time and what he feels is still too close to the surface for comfort. She's trying to ignore him too but sitting so near, listening to her move around in his space, impacting on his senses with her presence and waiting for the universe to unsync them seems cruel and he's not even sure anymore if he means to himself or to her.

His food is suddenly unappetizing and he shoves it out of the way, picks up the datapad and stands, scraping his chair on the floor. He can read these reports elsewhere on the ship. Where it's quiet, where she is not, where maybe he can concentrate.

"You're going?" she blurts without warning. She still doesn't look up but she stops scraping, her hands stalled.

"Yes. I can't think with the noise you're making."

"Please. Please don't. I want. I want to ask you something."

He blinks, long and slow. "Really, Rey?"

"Yes, really. I've been… I'm trying to work up to it."

"Okay," he says finally, nonplussed. "Ask."

She exhales loudly once, and then again. She turn on her knee to plop down, sitting cross legged in her filthy clothes, with dirty hands and some unknown fear lurking in the lines of her face. She puts the tool across her lap and wraps her fingers around it as if bracing herself.

She looks up and he's caught then in the color of her eyes when he didn't mean to be. She looks determined.

She looks scared.

"Why did you do it?"

He takes a slow breath. "Why did I do what, Rey? Why any of it? Why all of it? You'll need to be more specific."

"You know. You know what I mean."

"No. I don't." And he's never going to get tired of that phrase for the way her eyes always narrow and her mouth always compresses when he says it. The twist in his heart is a little ugly but he likes that it makes her angry. It helps keeps both of them on track.

"Fine," she snaps. "Why did you lure us into that trap? What did you even gain out of it?"

"That's not your question."

She half shrugs, a tiny roll of her shoulder. "Answer it anyways. Why? It's not like we were there trying to liberate an entire carrier stashed in cold storage or anything."

He tentatively brushes his thoughts over hers and yes, she's hiding something but mostly he just feels her hardening determination to face him. Face it, whatever it is. He runs a hand through his hair then tosses the datapad onto the desk, clattering it against the bowl. Fine. If she wants to do this, he can let her. But he'll do it his way.

He walks over and folds himself easily to the floor just in front of her, crossing his legs as well and draping his long arms over his knees to hang down so that his knuckles nearly brush her clothing. The change in perspective is electrifying. He used to do this with Skywalker. Asking. Answering, knee to knee on the ground, as if sitting in the dirt would add extra purity to the exchange.

"No, just records that you were told would lead you to smuggled arms and ammo storage caches in that sector."

"Yes. So what was the point? It's so… so small to you. What did it matter?"

He thinks about what he wants to say. She has to know the answer to this and this isn't what she really wants to ask. Even she can't be this naive.

He looks into her eyes, so close and so bright and trying to be so guarded against him and realizes… perhaps she can be. When would she have had a chance to learn anything else?

"General Hux," he decides to offer, "is not as interested in crushing the fragments of the Resistance as I am. Too focused on consolidation and expansion in the now, and not on how to prevent what the future can bring. But he really doesn't have a choice in the matter so when I yank on his chain, he indulges me. If we had leaked the coordinates to, oh, that command carrier you mentioned, even if it was as real as the nose on your face and under tissue paper guard with antiquated lock codes, the Resistance would have ignored it. Rightfully. You couldn't man it, for one thing. You certainly can't afford the fuel for it. Unless you've taken to plundering the minds of shady traders in backwater markets full time?"

She glares and he softens his gaze. "Ah, well. Perhaps not. Well then, no matter how juicy that might seem to you, some worthy amount of... largeness, whatever that might mean, Organa would never have taken that bait. But smuggler caches? She knows those. She knows those intimately and how many there can be in a tiny area and how much they can often hold. It was perfectly tailored to what you need and Hux knows what he's doing when it comes to enticing his enemies to stick out their necks."

She leans in, her mouth a hard line. Her fingers grip the tool as if its a weapon, as if she means to raise it. "We lost good men in that fight. To that trap." That's closer. That's a lot closer to her actual question, he can feel her emotions spike under the surface of the words.

Kylo shrugs. "So did we. Men, at least, although I wouldn't swear to their particular goodness."

"So you spent all that effort to flush us out into the open, for what? The death of eight men in an underground bunker and handful more in the streets? That has to be a waste of the First Order's time."

"It could have been less, but no, you chose to save your friend. You do realize if you'd picked either of your other options the numbers would have been so much more in your favor."

She grits her teeth on the blistering return he just knows she wants to make. He lets her work through it. Watching her, memorizing her, he thinks that she really needs to eat more and sleep more. She's much too thin. He wants to reach out and wipe the dirt off her face, off her chin. His fingers twitch with the urge and he stills them with effort.

"There are times," he muses quietly, "when I am reminded how inexperienced you are, and how little you understand about how war games are played and for what stakes. Why aren't you asking your commander about this?"

She does growl at him for that which makes him smile. Still so fierce. He will miss that if she loses it somewhere, her apparent infinite capacity to want to attack him regardless of odds. Then the thought of why that appeals to him wipes the smile off his face and he shakes his head to dispel it before it has a chance to latch on.

"They wouldn't talk me about it," she admits grudgingly, "I asked and they said… well, it doesn't matter what they said. Apparently they can give me orders that I need to follow but the rest is not for me to concern myself with. Even when it goes so horribly, completely wrong."

"So here you are, asking me."

"You'll tell me the truth, won't you?" she shoots back.

"Yes," he breathes. "I am and I will. I could lie to you, but I don't want to."

She shifts at that and something helpless moves through her eyes. His throats closes on the feeling that flashes between them and he swallows it down. His hands clench and release. "You're not always right," she says in a near whisper, as if reminding herself of it.

"Maybe. But I'm not always wrong. But… as for what you didn't actually say, it's stupid on their part. Your command. You're not a soldier and the Force will give you knowledge your average trooper will not have. Not even counting how you can find _me_ through it, even if all they believe is that you have something that will tell you where I am on a battlefield. And I bet you my grandfather's saber that you haven't said anything different to them about us and what we are to each other."

"There is," she says a little forcefully, "no _us_, Kylo Ren. And you don't have your grandfather's saber to bet, I do."

He shrugs and keeps his hands on his knees. "Yet I'm looking right at you, Rey. You had a question and you came to me to ask it. And maybe one day I am going to kiss you or you are going to kiss me but… no bet, I take it?" He thinks about pulling her onto his lap though, curling her in his arms while they talk, letting the image of it dominate his thoughts.

She flushes in answer, although whether its for the words or the longing he's projecting he can't be sure.

"I haven't told anyone either. We," he says quietly, "_are_. What we are, I don't know any more than you do, but _something_." He flicks his fingers in a negating motion, not exactly sure what he's pushing away when all he really wants to do is pull her in. "Maybe enemies, but I don't think so."

"Maybe," she whispers back. She looks to her hands gripping the forgotten chisel, flexing her fingers. "I don't think so either. Something."

He takes a deeper breath, leaning back because suddenly he knows he's going to move towards her in two more heartbeats and he's not ready for that. He will never be ready for that. "I, however, am not stupid nor am I in your chain of command. So yes, if you want to know, I'll tell you exactly why the First Order bothered to seed that intel and even what we got out of it. Hux can stretch himself even more creatively the next time I send him after you."

"I would... yes. Yes. I want to know."

His scavenger, always starved for knowledge, for understanding and desperate enough at this point to come to him to find it. Why are they notfeeding her? His mother, at the very least, should be handling this better.

"Can we start with the understanding that the Resistance is a former shade of itself? I don't want your exact complement numbers, even if I thought you'd share them, but can we both agree that the First Order overwhelms what you can bring to the field now by an order of several magnitudes?"

She nods after a moment.

"Good. So let's start there. We are large and at the moment you are tiny. This makes you hard to find, hard to spot, hard to pin down. If you did the smart thing and all scattered as individuals, you'd simply disappear. I might find some of you with effort but the Resistance itself would be gone in every meaningful sense. Only to rise, of course, a decade from now stronger and with more teeth for the waiting and the building and this war will erupt all over again. So that is my priority - I want all of you dead, as fast as possible, to keep that from happening. I let myself get distracted by Skywalker on Crait. Now I'm paying the price for it."

He holds up a finger as she opens her mouth. "Your command knows this. But scattering isn't in their best interests because in staying together, perhaps they can still accomplish something meaningful in the short term. There's only so much time left before the old guard is gone. So while it would be smart to disperse, Organa appears to be opting to keep fighting, trying to leverage what she still has while she can still oversee it. And the First Order as a whole does not turn particularly quickly although let's also take it as agreed that I can move an entire planet's resources faster than your General probably thinks I can. Regardless, the takeaway here is that while you are desperate, you're also fast and hard to catch."

"Which is why you're still one step behind," she says.

He shrugs. "Yes. So my General dangles a prize that's juicy enough to tempt your General out of the hole she's… well, holed up in and makes it small enough that she feels it can be taken with minimal or no losses, coming out the other side with enough resources that will make a difference to the Resistance as it exists now. In, out, done. And your command snaps it up and sends you and your friends in. So it's a trap. And you lost, what, eight men you said?"

"Thirteen."

"Thirteen. A single squad of soldiers. That is nothing to the First Order but a heavy blow to the Resistance. So that's one reason why - disproportionate losses. Every man or machine or weapon you lose, you will have difficulty replacing. Attrition is your enemy, not mine. Which is why your commander probably wishes greatly that you had gone to save the eight men walking into the jaws of the trap, regardless of your friendship to the traitor."

"I wasn't leaving Finn to die!"

"I know. I was hoping he, or someone like him, perhaps your Best Pilot? I was hoping for one or both of them to be there to make sure you that you couldn't make a better, more logical choice. Want more?"

Her cheeks are pale and her lips are tight but she nods. She wants knowledge, even though it's painful and he approves. He half closes his eyes and listens to her mind sway as she absorbs this lesson. This is closer to her question. Something to do with her friend.

"Good. That was actually a secondary objective, by the way. Another secondary objective was again, disproportionate effort. The Resistance committed much more to that little scrub skirmish than the First Order did and as it was your primary operation, there was not much else the Resistance could potentially accomplish at the same time. Tying up your resources, even if you had sustained no losses, was good for us in an objective sense. And of course we then knew exactly where most of you were."

He warms to his topic, leaning back in again. She mirrors him and he really, really wants to take her hands in his. He lowers his voice, weaving it between them like a bridge.

"Our major objectives were, in order, to drive home that your intel going forward could very well be compromised, meaning the Resistance will be much less likely to trust anything coming from any single source. Which means you'll be bogged down in trying vet everything about anything that comes your way before acting on it. This will be paralyzing. Your entire organization will be more cautious, less active, will reach out less often and with less confidence, for fewer rewards. You'll grow slower. I will have more time to find you."

Rey looks a little sick and Kylo finds himself nodding along as he sees her take that in, even if she's only seeing all of this exactly how its been laid out to her.

"And in last place," he finished quietly, "for what we were trying to do, is simple demoralization. You did take losses, and fairly heavy ones for what you have. Those who are being sent out to do the dirty work may start distrusting their orders, be reluctant to act on them in the field, may be more likely to desert if they are told to do something that seems too risky. And your command now knows that you will sacrifice people to save just one. This will make you... unreliable."

"I am not! Finn is my friend, they understand that. I wasn't going to leave him there to die."

"Perhaps. But as I said, secondary objectives. The Jedi have no attachments, Rey. The Jedi code _forbids_ you to have attachments. But you do. You feel strongly for your friends. Yet that code that the Resistance holds so closely to the Light requires that you must always act for the good of many, or for as many as you can. That you chose instead to save just one person, a friend, and left others to die will speak much more eloquently than anything you say with words."

If she was pale before, now she looks stricken.

"That's your question, isn't it, Rey?" he says softly in the spreading silence. "Why won't they tell you what went wrong. Why don't they trust you."

She scrubs at her face then, hiding her expression, and the dirt streaks even more. Everything around her is tinged with hurt and a sudden misery. "How can you do all of this? How can you know all of this?"

This time he doesn't want to deny either of them. He reaches out cautiously, slowly. Takes the barest edge of her fingers in his to weave them together. And she permits. Oh, she permits with her breath trembling out just as his does and even in this slightest of touches, she tightens her fingers as if to feel him more.

"I've been a prisoner in one way or another most of my life, Rey. And I used to be where you are, knowing only what you know, trying to live under a set of rules that I didn't understand and couldn't follow. And now here I am, on the other side and maybe your enemy, and the Dark has been a very thorough teacher. And - I'm Leia Organa's son. Who do you think I learned it from first?"

He has time to lift her stained fingertips to his lips, a chaste almost touch that he can see reflected in her eyes before the world divides and she shimmers, is gone.


	18. snakebite

If he could simply Force choke what they need out of whichever being in this room has the most of it, he would.

Untraceable credits on blank white chips buried in digital vaults, gray value information systems spanning this star cluster, underground black market supply routes running through it; whatever it is that Hux wants, he's more than ready to just stand up and strip it out of the minds of every sentient creature here if it means he can leave.

He's been in places like this so many times before and it scrapes along his skin like sand. Thirty floors into the sky and surrounded by office upon office of high level government, the floor to ceiling holoports make it seem as if they look upon dusk-scented gardens instead. There are jeweled automatons that resemble birds flitting high overhead, columns of white marble and a pale gold floor, high backed chairs and low couches. There is even the sound of a far away river, barely at the edge of hearing and a sweet breeze circulates. No expense has been spared, it seems, to impress him.

He'd been showcased in places much like this as a boy; more actual ancestral estate and less holoproj perhaps but the look is familiar regardless. His mother's hope, his uncle's pride, his father the thing best not mentioned. Exquisite furniture arranged in patterns meant to encourage the exchange of secrets, the sale of blackmail and worse. Expensive walls dripping with wealth and power from every polished surface. Small laughter and sharp eyes, the fingers like hooks that would rest on his thin shoulders.

Always found lacking with his ragged hair and his smuggler's reflexes and his oh, so very questionable ancestry because whatever else that could have been said of Ben Solo as a child, he'd never been polished enough to fit in places like this.

Now, he's still rough cut against all of this opulence, his hair still black and reflecting nothing and somewhere inside himself that's very pleasing. Kylo Ren fits this place now as Ben Solo never could by virtue of being able to twitch his fingers and destroy the planet it stands on.

And he's getting irritated enough to want to.

He near one of the mock archways that disguises the actual wall, having thrown himself into the largest seat he could find when he walked in with Hux and his entourage trailing behind and he hasn't bothered to move since. Wherever he is is the defacto central point after all and he's been trying to amuse himself by watching the jockeying for position both as near and as far away from him as possible as the evening wears on. A lodestone, lining up all the magnets around him in orderly little lines of power and privilege.

He's not meant for this and he knows it. His strengths are often an exact match to his weaknesses and being good at delicate political machinations does not appear on either of those lists. Being willing to listen to it being enacted in front of him isn't there either, yet his physical presence could potentially collapse three months of effort into three days and Hux had all but insisted, insofar as the man dares to push his agenda onto Ren's.

His General's dark uniform stands out across the room along those of his hand picked psycoprop staff, black troopers stationed at implacable intervals along the projected illusions in jarring contrast to glittering jewelry of everything else. He glares at the bright red hair but Hux doesn't stiffen or turn around in acknowledgement, engaged in conversation as he is.

Ren considers making his displeasure known a little more strongly. Peeling the bulk of the wealth out of this cluster by physically peeling apart its elite is something he really wishes Hux had offered up as an option but instead all he can do is sit here and imagine it. Maybe if he pays more attention somebody will finally do something he can take overt offense to.

On the left there's what appears to be a female of some furred species, at least going by the layers of sheer fabric and subtle perfume, and on his right two male Devaronians who seem to have a better understanding of how to approach him which means they're engaging with the possible female while he sits here and overhears the exchange. It has something to do with high density ferroconcretes and their application to something he didn't bother catching. He doesn't know if the coded female is important, meant to add decorative interest to the room, intended to attract him personally if possible or any of six other possibilities.

Ren taps his finger on the arm of the chair and sets a wave of lights swaying. He shifts his attention to the back of the room looking for anything entertaining to watch. The female leans in closer at his side to make a stronger point to her audience and her perfume shifts.

That's when he feels it hit.

Later, he'll wonder how he even had that much warning. But in the moment, he inhales and his vision flares in a sudden corona, bright and jagged. The Force around him pulses sickeningly. He can taste it coating the back of his throat like a wine gone bad.

He strikes out with his mind and instantly recoils. He doesn't know exactly what this is, but he knows then what it's meant to do. The female shape wavers, retreating. He has no time to care.

No time.

"Hux!"

He gets to his feet somehow. He can feel it starting to tick down, now that he feels it, now that he knows what it is, already starting to saturate his bloodstream, licking at his heart. For a wild, hot moment he thinks he might be able to Force burn it out, set it and himself on fire in time to keep this from happening but no, no, he's already taken too much in.

And Hux is halfway across the room. Only just turning his head with a sharp frown, probably for the tone of voice. Too loud, too grating, too crass. Too everything that he doesn't like.

"Supreme Leader?" But he is turning, putting down his wine glass. Ren can hear the murmured excuses, how he's a man meant for the battlefield, not the boardroom and certainly not a civilized party and there is polite, knowing laughter. Too slow. Too slow. _Hux_.

He grabs it by the throat, wills himself to one more moment of coherency.

"_Armitage!_" The lash snaps out and something shatters.

That gets through. That gets through fast and Hux goes from smiling politician to the First Order's butcher in the time it takes him to blink, his long legs moving from amble to ground devouring stride. His face is twisting and Ren has no time to care what the expression means because he's already sliding, losing his grip on reality, the growl starting to rise unwillingly in his chest, in his throat.

He's in arm's reach. Kylo grabs and yanks, pulling the other man hard into him. No time. He kicks out Hux's legs, collapsing him against his body, sinks his fingers into his commander's jacket to twist the material in a fist to make sure Hux stays right where he is.

He seethes with it. The room is already trembling, glasses nervously talking to themselves as his power starts to rise, cut off from control and panicking. He feels it pouring off his body like smoke. Terrible. Clawing. Indiscriminate.

His tongue feels like it's cleaved to the roof of his mouth. There are no more words, just the agony of his teeth grinding together.

This would kill. This is meant to kill, meant to divorce him from who he is, hamstring him where he stands and twist his mind into itself, unable to strike back with his blood boiling under pressure lost and unable to find a way out. Force sensitivity launched into the stratosphere, burning as it goes. This would kill anyone lesser.

_Stupid_, he has time to think. _This was stupid_.

That's all he has time for. The poison rears back and sinks fangs into his mind.

He screams and he does as he was taught to do, conditioned to do, split open and _rebuilt_ to do, a weapon with one exquisitely violent direction and channels pain into _rage_.

He loses everything else but his grip on Hux never slackens.

* * *

_No known counteragent._

He's long prided himself on his ability to work within the constraints he's been given. There are very few people or situations he cannot persuade, subvert, or outright sabotage to his advantage when he sets his mind to it and he is not going to let today be the exception to his outstanding record.

If he'd have been asked how this evening's power exchange disguised with a thin layer of social oil was going to end, this would not have been in his top five picks. He'd been prepared for Ren to do something detrimental to the cause out of boredom or anger or quite possibly both. He'd been prepared for the Grand Marshal of this world to be equally obtuse for far more eloquent reasons. He'd been prepared to have to persuade no less than four different beings with decades of enmity behind them that working with the First Order was absolutely in their best interests as their options were much more limited than they'd been led to believe, and he'd expected to be able to do it without once having to speak plainly. He'd even been prepared for riots from the rabble in the streets for the First Order presence here if it came to that, although that was somewhat far down on his personal list of likely eventualities. He'd planned for all of it, prepared for most of it.

But not this. He breathes. He keeps walking. He is not going to lose control now.

_No known counteragent._

He has the name of the drug and its chemical makeup. A rather narrow list of known results which started with convulsion and ended with death and didn't bother to flirt with the rest of the alphabet. A sub-list of cascading permutations of those two items, listed not alphabetically or by most to least common but by, of all things, time scale versus midichlorian count. He finally has where the drug comes from, its most common preparations, the most effective ways to administer it and precious little else.

What he does have is aftermath and it is, quite frankly, terrifying.

And maybe he'd known it somewhere but somehow he's managed to keep overlooking it. A few Force tricks. A hair trigger temper primed to go off at the smallest things. A mind not trained for large scale manipulations if extremely dangerous at individual ones. He keeps falling back into the mindset that had been ground into him from their time under Snoke and he curses himself for failing to consider that perhaps he'd been pushed in that direction for a reason.

Ren is terrifying. And not in the sense of scary or frightening, although he is that - as in the oldest possible definition which is _full of terror_.

Ren apparently doesn't have a midichlorian count. Ren is apparently just made of the stuff.

Hux is not losing control over this. He will shuffle his perspective about his current superior when he has time to consider it fully, which is not now or possibly anytime soon, which may extend to not while both of them are on the same planet.

That little piece of information is something he really should have ferreted out before now. Or perhaps the former Supreme Leader had simply enjoyed watching him snipe at Ren in his ignorance, which seems much more likely. But he has it now, listed on the flimsy he has tucked into his belt along with the rest of the numbers about the drug that somehow managed to make its way undetected into that room.

After the first handful of seconds there had been no more room to be concerned with. Concussive blasts, as hard and as fast as a fully deployed quake tower as Ren had apparently tried to shake off his impending demise like a wet dog. By time the time he'd finally succumbed to mere unconsciousness instead of the medically approved death, Hux had had a truly spectacular view of the horizon in pretty much every direction.

Best part is he has no idea how they both hadn't been crushed by falling debris as everything else in a hundred meter radius was reduced to so much paste on the no longer existing walls.

Second best part is, for all he knows, the Supreme Leader actually had managed to make sure to miss the load bearing supports while in the grip of a virulent toxin meant to scramble every synapse he had. There is no question in his mind about his fate if he hadn't have made it to Ren.

If Ren hadn't called out.

His boots hit the ground in perfect staccato as his comm device continues to whisper reports in his ear, updating the situation in real time. The whole thing is now a political and economic nightmare along with his personal one.

He's used to dealing with the first two. Not something he wants to brag about because a catastrophe is still a catastrophe no matter how nicely you phrase it and he'd been actively trying to avoid those tonight, but it's the third that keeps taking him off his metaphorical feet, much as Ren took him off his actual ones.

The scrape of pain in his knees from being forced down so fast. The line of the burn he can feel when he swallows, earned from the strangling grip on his collar. The infernal _noise_ that is still trying to ring in his ears.

No. _No_. Hux jerks his chin up. _Control_. He's alive. So was Ren the last time he was updated by some sort of mystic Force miracle. Those are the two pertinent facts he needs to hold onto. He is not going to collapse into a mess about it until much later, if ever.

He'd been the only one to get back up in the aftermath. Once he'd staggered back to his feet and senses, he'd had the entire building locked down — or what had remained of it at least. Within fifteen minutes, he had the complex and now, two hours later he's holding at ten kilometers in every direction just to give himself some breathing room.

His hands are shaking and he can't make them stop.

He'd brought down three of the escort cruisers as soon as he'd stood up and realized he still had a working comm link. They're currently parked in precise alignment six kilometers over his head as a visual notification of his extreme displeasure at the outcome of the failed talks. He can taste the urge like copper between his teeth to bring the _Adamant_ down as well from her high orbit. He wants it badly and it's only the fingernail grip he has on common sense that's keeping him from making that mistake, as good as it would feel. If he brings her down, he'll want to use her guns and he's going to save that for… well, he's saving it.

He distracts himself with the stream of words in his ear and the pleasure of passing each cluster of troopers posted at every intersection, their weapons primed and at the ready. His personal escort is regulation distance behind him, marching in step.

Absolutely nothing is moving through his established perimeter that is not First Order. Their presence - _his_ presence - has come down like an orbital strike, he's made crushingly sure of it. What had been a polite fiction of military distance and goodwill for this series of meetings has been cast aside for the paralyzing reality and if he could raze this entire city for this affront without creating even more of a disaster, he would without question.

_No known counteragent._

How dare they. _How dare they_.

He turns into the infirmary, his escort peeling off to take up positions on either side of the door as it slides unhappily along its track. He frowns at the painful grind of metal on metal but it does open. He realizes the problem when he's confronted with an unimpeded view of the patient in question.

He's pretty sure there'd been a clear viewing wall there before. And more operative numbers of droids.

He edges around the crumpled and split machinery. Somehow Ren's not only awake but actually sitting sideways on the medical chair even if his hands are clenched hard around the edge for stability. His tunic is wide open, exposing a swath of bare flesh pockmarked with abrasions that were probably medical implants he's torn out. His hair is completely wrecked. From this angle he looks like he's just recovering from a rather hedonistic party.

He looks up as Hux walks in and there's something very wrong with his eyes.

"How are you even _functional?_" is the first thing he thinks to say.

Ren actually quirks his lips as Hux closes the distance. His eyes. It takes him a few more steps but then realizes it's because the man's sclera have completely disappeared. So black it's like looking into a void.

"A question for another time. I need you to tell her to stop." Those eyes glitter and his voice is rough enough to be concrete.

He looks around. There's no one here. "What? Who, her?"

"She keeps trying to heal me. It's making her sick." Ren shudders then, bone hard and blood spittle flecks his lips. The metal strewn all over the floor rattles and Hux just barely catches his own flinch in time. That's what he remembers from those few minutes where his world view got readjusted as to Force user potential. Ren shaking and the world splitting apart around them in shrieking sympathy.

Ren looks down at the floor and his fingers flex again, making the metal of the chair creak. "_Stop it_."

Hux takes a deep breath and shoves down his reaction, even as his eyebrows want to crawl into his hairline. "Hallucinations weren't on the list of symptoms, but I suppose since nobody else has ever lived through this they might be forgiven for having missed that one. As it appears you've wrecked the medical droids, if you want a placebo for seeing things that aren't there I'll need to arrange for more to be sent."

"No. I am _not_ translating. Come here." Ren's eyes flick up again and he repeats himself. "Come here, Hux."

Apparently that wasn't addressed to the air. He takes a few cautious steps closer and Ren reaches out imperiously. His hand grips hard above his hip, the wide stretch curving around his side to nearly to his spine. He can feel the individual impress of those long fingers.

Hux freezes.

"Really, Ren?" he gets out after a moment. "Is this where we have that conversation again about who hates being touched more?"

"Do you see him? Hear him?"

"Ren?"

There a moment's pause. Then, "Report."

Well, he knows that one at least out of this whole surreal conversation. "Am I reporting to Ren or the Supreme Leader?"

The fingers flex, drawing him infinitesimally closer. "Give me Ren's report."

"Well, you'll be happy to know you're not dead. Congratulations."

"Thank you. What else?"

"That's about it for Ren. According to the medical flimsy I read while walking over here to check on your comatose body and query the medical droids in person about any possibility of your continued brain function, you're dead and I'm the Supreme Leader now. The salient talking point is there's no known counteragent. Symptoms are convulsions, rapid onset and widespread damage targeting the victim's Force receptors, cascading system failure immediately following as the body cannibalizes itself trying to fix that damage and then actual death within minutes after ingestion, occasionally within seconds depending on certain factors. The fact that I'm still reporting to you in any capacity at all is frustrating."

Ren's grip tightens and Hux wonders if he's going to bruise. The man sways forward and his forehead drops to rest on Hux's chest. This close he can feel the heavy breath gusting as Ren exhales, the constant minute trembling throughout his entire body as fine muscles twitch and flex spasmodically. The heat boiling off his skin is hard to believe.

Hux lifts his hand incoherently, hovering over the dark hair before letting it drop again to his side. He flexes his fingers to get rid of the incongruous urge to touch back. That is not an acceptable response in any scenario.

"Do you want the other report now?"

"Highlights."

"Three escorts in close orbit above the city, hard perimeter with full combat parameters established at ten kilometers and the _Adamant_ on high alert standby. Since I don't know precisely what to shoot at, I haven't brought her any closer. Once I know who or what is responsible for this attack against us, I'll wipe them or it off the face of this world and then I'll have a much clearer idea as to what I advise as primary and secondary objectives."

"Bloodthirsty."

"Have we met before? If whoever was responsible wasn't in that room and isn't currently being suctioned off the floor with a straw, I will have them found, dragged in front of me and eviscerated while their grandmother watches. I will then move onto their siblings and children, and likely several orders of cousins. I may order wine."

"Very bloodthirsty. I approve. Can you speed up my recovery? This is… painful." Ren's voice cracks on the last word.

"No. I can bring another droid in, if you promise not to rip it apart, and make sure you're hydrated, top up your electrolytes and perhaps have them attend to your cuticles if they're bothering you. This poison was _rare_, Ren. So rare it took my best over an hour to dig the information out of the Coruscant deep archives as the last known victim was over four hundred standard years ago and I might as well have saved the effort for how much actually helpful information was in there. I can tell you that it probably killed everybody that came in contact with it during the preparation stages if that makes you feel better. I am still not sure how it got in the room at all and considering what you did to the place, I doubt I'll ever get a satisfactory answer as to the vector."

"It was perfume. At least I am pretty sure it was perfume. What did I do to the place?"

"There's no room left. There is barely building on that side, actually."

"I may want to see that later. But there you go, can you give up now? There's nothing you can do and I'm still alive so stop making both of us feel like this."

"Hallucinations really weren't mentioned. Do you mind telling me who you think you're talking to?"

He can hear the grimace in the voice. "Somebody who is absurdly worried for me in case I actually do die and it leaves a hole in their psyche they're not prepared to deal with yet."

"If it helps, had you in fact died as you were supposed to, my psyche would have been just fine. I would have had an ascension ceremony to plan which can be quite time consuming. Thank you, by the way." It takes hard effort to say the words and they come out clipped and tight. Still. It has to be acknowledged. And he will.

"For?"

"Saving me."

"Armitage."

And those fingers flex again on his hip and Hux looks up at the ceiling. Keep his own hand at his side by force of will. "Warlord Ren. Can you let go of me now?"

"And if I don't want to?"

"Supreme Leader."

"Hux. You are very annoying, but... as you wish. Your reports have been delivered. I will require hydration and those promised electrolytes as soon as you can arrange them and I don't want you to do anything irrevocable until I've had a chance to interrogate whichever next of kin you suspect the most. Somebody made a very stupid decision that was not well thought out and I am going to rip it out of them slowly for putting me through this."

He stares down at the dark head. "I did not hear you say that. Didn't you hear the part about _hundreds of years ago_ and _incredibly virulent for Force users_ and oh, there's never been a survivor of this particular toxin? Did I have to spell those parts out? This took an incredible amount of planning to set up, and I want every person responsible found and _destroyed_ out to the tenth bloody generation of their family tree, along with all of their employees and their families and whatever city they were based in will be receiving love taps for the next year until it and the closest hundred kilometers disappears into the very mantle as an object lesson. Nobody attacks the First Order like this. Nobody can be permitted to think they can attack _you_."

"What's this? Anger on my behalf?" Ren questions, his voice scraping like rocks under white water.

Hux hesitates and he curses himself for the delay, tiny as it is. He's heard those words before and he didn't like them or their implication then either. "I am loyal to the First Order, of course, and to you, Supreme Leader. You must agree that this attempt — any attempt — must be punished thoroughly, completely and without mercy."

Ren laughs and then shudders again even harder than before, making a small, wounded sound. Hux's mouth goes dry but this time at least nothing in the room flexes. Finally the man's hand drops away from his side and he's able to step back as Ren raises his head.

His eyes are still solid black and it's still very disconcerting to look at. A midichlorian count high enough to be meaningless and a hallucinating man where there should be a very, very dead one.

"Very well. Your loyalty to the First Order as a whole is commendable. You are dismissed, General Hux. Report to me if the situation changes or you find urgently relevant information. And send me that medical droid."

Hux half bows and turns to leave. "It shall be as you command, Supreme Leader."


	19. touch

She's under a T-70 fighter, forearms deep into the relay panel and trying to tease out the fried wiring when it slams into her.

One minute she's cursing under her breath for just one more inch of height so she can kriffing reach that stupid connection point and the next she's hard on her knees, breathless with pain and unable to do anything but gasp.

For a moment, she's lost to it. She wraps her arms around her middle, hunching, as if that could somehow contain it. Could help.

Then again, a spike driving itself through her eye and this time she manages to keen, stuttering out a high, thin whine. There's an incoherent need to push it out, drive it off, _throw it away_ and she does. Her scattered tools and kit slam across the ground, banging into a pile of nearby containers. Dust follows in agitated curls in an outgoing wave. She somehow manages to suck in a frantic lungful of air.

"Rey?" she hears faintly. "Hey, Rey. You okay over there?"

The third strike is a hammer and she's finally able to scream, scraping her hands on the smooth deck as if she can reach through it somehow into bedrock. The pain is a tornado, claws and teeth ripping through everything, mindless as a locust swarm and she tries to throw it off again, and yet again in a red haze of panic. The machine above her rocks on its supports. It's eating her _alive_.

There's blood then, under her hands, on her arm and it's only then that she realizes it's not her. She's sliced herself open on the metal as she fell,that's hers, that's her pain, her singing nerves protesting, her very own blood trickling down her very own skin, her fingernails bent back and snapped. The rest isn't.

The rest of it is his.

She tears herself out of the entanglement, splitting herself in half to slam the link closed.

Alone.

She's empty. Light. It's just her now. All alone in her skin, no pain, no hurt. There's a thunder in her ears that thumps louder and louder that she eventually identifies as a heartbeat. She has a heartbeat. There's still a world out there. Air. The sound of boots running. Metal and grease and the tang of scorch that has everything to do with melted plastics and she's supposed to deal with that problem next, if she can just get the circuits hooked up and working again.

Blood patters in slow drops down her arm. She watches it collect on her fingers, painting a mandala on the hard concrete.

Then Poe's arm is around her waist, half dragging her from under the ship as her legs don't want to work anymore. She clutches at her injured arm out of some odd thought that she should do something with it. It should hurt, shouldn't it? But it's nothing. She feels nothing. Just sweet blessed relief at not being on fire anymore.

"Rey? Rey! What's wrong? What… your arm? You okay?"

She looks up into Dameron's concerned eyes. "Something's wrong," is all she can think of to say. "Something's really wrong."

* * *

She barely waits for her injury to be bound up. She doesn't even protest the precautionary medications, simply sticks her arm out for the injection, swinging herself off the table immediately afterwards.

She has no idea what excuse she uses but something in her expression, while she can see Poe is worried, gets him out of her way as she bolts out of their tiny jury-rigged medical bay in a near run.

She's afraid to open her shields. Is he dead? He has to be dead. Nobody could have survived that.

Her heart stutters, a different agony wanting to rise, wants to seize and stop in her chest and she swallows it down over and over as her legs flash, put distance behind her. No. _No_. She won't accept it, she won't. Somehow, she'd know and there's no way he's dead, he can't be, she'd feel it even under the shields, she _would_.

But she's inhaling air so fast it's near sobbing out of her lungs. She's moving much too quickly through the corridors and she doesn't mean to be because people are staring as she tears by but there's no time, she has to get out of here, she has to find somewhere safe, somewhere away from prying eyes and questions, somewhere where she can _look_ and please, he can't be dead, no matter what she felt she refuses to believe he's not there anymore.

She fumbles at the lock and wrenches open a door that leads outside, taking the battered stairs two at a time. A safe place far away from anyone else, that's all she knows.

* * *

It's the first time she's forced the link to obey. She didn't even know she could make it obey.

The bulk of this base is underground but there are a few single level sheds scattered on the surface to house the overland transports. She's past those now into the small patch of half cleared ground between the last of them and where the land tumbles down into sparse scrub.

There's no reason at all for anyone to come here and she hopes nobody does, hopes nobody followed her but she can't wait any longer. The fear is overwhelming.

She will always know where he is and that's a hiccup of breath for the memory of his dark voice asking if she's told anyone else what they are, with the unsaid implication behind it that they are _everything_ and she'd shoved it away, hadn't said anything back because they are not anything, they are not anything _at all_ and she will admit to nothing that will give him any more of a hold on her but for all she knows he's dead and she's still _here_.

She drops her shields flat and opens herself to the Force as she's never done before.

Is this what he sees? She's always been careful. To see, to know, to use, yes, but never before with all that she is. Never without proper caution, a necessary respect. She'd touched him once before with power sleeting through him like rain and even through the filter of his mind, it had been overwhelming. There's just _so much_.

The mundane sound of her own strangled scream snaps her back.

She shunts aside what she cannot hold, fumbling to let it pour through and out as if it was indeed water, trying to remember what she felt through him, what he had done. She makes herself into a needle, orienting in the here and the there, holding herself wide open by force of will.

Alive.

Alive alive alive still alive and pulsing raggedly, shot through with colors that tell her _damaged_ and _wounded_ and _hurt_ but he's still there, still burning wildly through the Force. She sobs her relief.

She will always know where he is. His bleeding signature is an unraveling vortex and she wraps the link between them around her arm like it's a chain and she _pulls_.

He's lying on his back on some sort of wide, articulated chair, his shirt peeled open and one long arm hanging down. A white droid hovers over him with injectors extended. Several are burrowed into his chest like thin fingers and her skin shocks cold.

An interrogation room. Straps and metal and terror and she lurches forward, raising her scraped fingers into claws. He's been captured? Has the First Order turned on him?

She screams and tears the droid apart, crushing metal, shredding it at the joints, reaching again to shatter the pieces smaller even as they fall. She hadn't known she could do that but the satisfaction she feels is savage. She shoves the pieces away from him and they disappear into wherever he is as she darts forward.

There are other devices on him and she frantically starts to pull them off. His skin is boiling hot, his breathing a rasp that somehow frightens her more than the rest. His jailors could be right here. There could be more torture droids. Until they touch him, she won't know and he's not awake to tell her.

"Kylo, _please_," she panics. "You need to wake up. We have to get you out of here."

Another droid materializes at her shoulder, jamming a needle into his arm and she snarls and splinters that one too.

"Kylo! Ben! _Wake up!_"

His eyes slit open at that, solid black and unrecognizable. She sobs with relief as she pulls the last of the implants off, throwing it away so hard it probably shatters.

She reaches for his mind, thinking incoherently of trying to find out what's happened, where do they have him, what she needs to do and there is _confusion, fear, a familiar acid hopelessness, pain, there is always pain, there will always _be _pain_ and his jaw clenches against it, rippling through his body.

"Get up, Kylo. Please, _please_ get up."

She feels his mind latch onto her voice with an overwhelming compulsion to obey when she's not even sure he knows his own name yet. His lips peel back in a snarl and he sits, a lurching, uncoordinated movement towards her and for a moment there's no recognition in his eyes. Hurt pulses sickeningly through the link.

Then those eyes lock on hers and white terror sheets across his mind so fast it's blinding. A single thought coalesces in the whirlpool of his feelings _she can't be here Snoke will kill her_ and she feels him grab incoherently for power, hard and fast.

And as soon as he flexes his mind the agony roars to the sky in a cyclone.

Whatever defense she'd unthinkingly erected against it is gone as it overwhelms them both, shattering shields like glass. She cries out and staggers back, hands to her head.

Through tears, she sees his fists clench and power slams out of him, somehow draining the pain with it. He does it again and then again and she can think again, feel again, breathe again.

She reaches out. So much pain.

"Don't touch me!" His hand shoots out to ward her off and oh, there's something wrong with his voice. Cracked, raw, near broken. "Rey, don't."

"Kylo, please! We have to get you out of there, they're hurting you. You have to escape! Tell me where you are."

He swings his legs over the edge of the chair to face her and grips the slick cushioned surface and she can feel how he's barely hanging on, his eyes desperately unfocused but this thoughts are falling into themselves fast, realigning. Somewhere she realizes this is something he's familiar with. No, something he's _practiced_. Agony and orientation inside it and something horrible thumps under her heart for the unexpected knowledge.

"No." He shakes his head as if words alone aren't enough of a negation. His mind clumsily brushes over hers. Scanning. "Not. What you think. Toxin. Poison. Infirmary."

She feels the wash of relief like cool water but then the wooden taste of fear comes hard on its heels behind it. She's broken the droids, peeled off the things that were on him and they must have been helping and she's wrecked them because she was scared.

"Not your fault."

There's so much wrongness in his body, he's shaking with it.

She reaches out, sliding helplessly closer as she reaches into the Force to, she doesn't even know, try to pull it out, heal what hurts even if she doesn't know how. Then the wrongness is in _her_, digging fingers into her mind and she whimpers without meaning to. Kylo groans as well, swaying.

"Don't. Rey, stop trying."

"It hurts. So much." The Force currents shift around him, uncertain but moving faster moment by moment and it's like a saw grating along her bones. He's inhaling power as his mind bleeds with each pull. She reaches again incoherently, trying to get more of the bad out of him and chokes again on the transfer.

He growls but then his head snaps up. _Hux_ drifts across his mind and there's an impression of black, silver, red. His emotions twist like a snake as he tracks something she can't see. Rey can't get a grip on any of it, it slides through so many permutations at once but he breathes out something cruel, something perilously close to satisfaction.

She knows of Hux. A name, a description, a list of monstrous qualifications. And she knows that everything the First Order does goes through the man that must have just walked into the room with them, a kill count not measured in bodies but in planets. She shrinks back without meaning to.

Kylo's feelings are overlapping shadows, shading all of it in ways that frighten.

"A question for another time," he growls then through the wreckage of his voice. "I need you to tell her to stop."

* * *

"He's gone," he says finally and his gaze slides to the floor. His shoulders flex and he licks the blood off his mouth and she half tastes it in hers, sharp and metal bright. Then he stops moving, holding frighteningly still as the toxin spikes again. His mind ripples with rage and warning as she starts to reach once more.

"_Don't_," he growls. His voice is jagged, all but destroyed. She knows now it's from screaming. "Stop trying. You heard Hux, this isn't something you can fix."

"Kylo, please. I have to… have to…"

"You have to nothing."

"Yes, I _do_. I can't leave you like this."

"You can't heal it, Rey. If I could burn this out, I would have already. Whatever this is, it's… clever. I can't find it inside me. It just… it keeps..."

He loses the train of thought, dark hair dangling in his face as he snarls his anger. She watches as the power he's looping in and out of his body whirls faster and then sags again. She doesn't know what he's doing or how he's doing it or how to help.

This isn't the first time she cursed Luke Skywalker for being too wrapped in his own stupid head to give her anything helpful, refusing to teach her anything for his own guilt and regret, but she's pretty sure she's never meant it more.

Somehow Kylo must catch some of it because he barks out a laugh. "Don't blame him," he chokes. "Snoke taught me this. Although not... exactly for this reason."

"Let me help. Please, Kylo. Let me help you."

"Why?" It's hard, ugly. She can't see the expression on his face because he's hiding it from her but his fingers have tightened.

"Because you're in pain."

"So? I'm used to it."

"So?" she grits out, suddenly angry at him because it's better than being scared. She throws her hands up. " So? You're _used to it_? How is that a reason? How can you possibly be used to something like this?"

She expects him to get angry back. He is furious, after all, she can feel it swirling under everything else, an impotent rage without direction. That someone has done this. That he was weak enough to fall to it. That he couldn't even stay on his feet.

That's all she gets before he realizes she's picking it up and his thoughts shred apart, subsumed into the whirl of his emotions. She tries to grope after them but there's nothing but smoke and lightning. He's so good at hiding.

"Because… no. _No_. I am not telling you anything about what I'm _used to_, it serves no purpose."

Then the poison surges again and they both stutter to a halt, waiting for it to crest and fall away. He slams a hand on the chair and power blows out around him again, scraping off the worst of the pain as if keeping it bleeding and fresh is the only thing that works.

He says nothing though and all she can see is his hair and the strain across his collarbone through the open shirt. He takes a breath that trembles more than he wants it to and she can feel his irritation that even that much is beyond him at the moment. As if she can't feel how much it's taking just to remain upright and conscious.

"_Kylo_. Let me help you. You don't have to do this alone. I'm here. I'm here and whatever you're doing, whatever you're trying to do, let me help you with it. _Please_. I can't just stand here and watch this."

"I should make you." For a hot moment the jagged feeling underneath the words comes through. He turns his face away as he realizes he's betrayed himself, another moment of vulnerability.

She edges closer. "Please."

"Fine," he snaps out. "But don't touch me. Let me… let me control it."

His hand twitches and then half rises towards her, palm up with fingers partially extended as if unsure. At the same time she feels him lean carefully against her mind. An invitation only. Dark and furred, red streaks of pain and fury.

She drops her ragged, half built shields even as she extends her own fingers towards him and trusts. He hurts so badly.

He doesn't swarm in as she'd half feared. His hand tightens in the air between them and his mind does the same, wrapping around her crudely, so different from his usual grace.

"Oh," she trembles at the contact though, because it's still him.

She can see so much more now, as if he acts like a lens, bringing everything in focus. She cracks the doors in her mind wider, rising to meet his wordless demand and she feels it flowing out of her like a river.

He lifts his head to meet her eyes, eyebrows pulled together with strain and exhaustion. Power starts to braid itself into a rope between them. Awkward, clumsy, like trying to dance without being able to hear the music.

But each heartbeat gets easier. Sweeter. His hand suddenly closes and she cries out softly, feeling as if he's half wrenched her out of her own body.

The river becomes a waterfall, a cascade tumbling into the chasm of his need. Yes. Oh, yes. More. Faster. The singing tension starts to fray as the link between them swells. Channeling the power hurts, it hurts so much, and she feels it feeding the frenzy inside him higher and higher because the more it hurts, the more he wants it to hurt. The more he needs it to hurt, somehow.

She shakes her head without meaning to. That can't be right. It makes no sense.

He's saying a mantra over and over again under his breath but she can't spare the attention to resolve it into words. She watches his face as if every answer she's ever needed is there. Holds herself steady through the feedback, tastes nausea and fear in her throat because he's afraid of this and the fear makes him angry and fury swells because anger shatters all limits and cares nothing for what it costs and she's never understood that before but oh, now she does, all the way down to their core.

His eyes bore into hers. So still where he sits in his pale flesh and dark cloth, just a man after all, but all she can feel is the open maw she's feeding.

She realizes out of nowhere that he's not trying to heal the damage at all or even end the pain. That isn't what this is at all.

His mouth spreads into a feral smile as he catches her thought and there's a spreading edge of sweetness coating her mind, a deep caress. She feels him latch on to the link, to the white rope he's built between them.

He closes his eyes.

He rips into himself. Tears without mercy into the smallest parts with teeth like needles and she cries out for both of them, bleeding herself frantically into the spaces where he is suddenly not. Wraps her own ethereal hand instinctively around the link to keep it steady, keeping it open when his attention turns away from it.

Strength to remake himself. Her compassion for him, his rage for what was done. His bright knowledge to find it, hunt it down, destroy it where it hides. Her frantic fear that she'll lose him, her half hidden anger that he would try and keep her away to drive them both forward, clawing at his death to inhale it in dripping mouthfuls of red.

More. _More_. Eat the pain. Consume it. Feel it and make it theirs. Fix what is broken. She keeps his heart beating and he relinquishes it to her without thought.

There is no time. Only purpose. His life is hers and she will never let it go.

Then it's just them. There's no pain now. No hurt, entwined around each other in the Force. Only the beat of his uninterrupted life blazing in her mind and she lets go of it reluctantly, unwillingly letting him slide back into his own body.

It's only when she finally opens her eyes that she realizes she's walked forward in a dream. She's nearly on top of him.

So close. Her fingers tremble over his upturned face.

She wants to so badly. The heat of him is overwhelming now and she'd never wanted anything more in her entire life. She can still taste his pulse under her tongue. She ghosts her fingers over his skin, so close to touching, stroking the air.

His eyes open and there is only black, the brown of his eyes still eclipsed. She can all but see the stars in it, he's swallowed so much and she remembers with a muted shock what it felt like to touch him when he's like this.

"Rey," he whispers. "Oh, _Rey_." His eagerness is a leaping thing, half strangled behind something she can't name and doesn't want to look at in case she can.

"Let me touch you now," she manages to get out. "Please."

He tenses at that, face tightening and she wonders what he sees with those eyes. "Why? You aren't even here."

"I can be."

She dares to sway closer, dream brushing the curve of his eyebrow. Her breath shakes as her gaze flickers between his eyes and his lips. He inhales at that and his mouth moves into a snarl she knows he doesn't actually feel.

"You'll regret it," he warns but she can hear the plea under it like a bell.

"Yes." And she will. Yet he hasn't made any effort to close the bridge and neither has she and she's still pouring it into him like it can't end because it won't. Even they can't do more than feel it as it goes by, endless and eternal. "I thought. I thought you were dead. I thought I'd lost you. Kylo. _Please_. Don't shut me out now."

He reaches up with his hand and his fingertips graze her face.

The feedback is instant.

His mouth tastes of blood and Dark as she locks her mouth over his without meaning to, without intending to and she feels his exaltation. It's hers as well, confusing, flickering like sparks, like sugar, like catastrophe.

She has no idea who thought it first, wanted it first, gave in to it first and it doesn't matter because yes even as his other hand closes bruisingly hard on the back of her neck. Her fingers dig into his shoulders.

She shudders as pleasure flashes through both of them. So good. His mouth is implacable and hungry, licking into hers. He shifts and then shifts again, fingers closing impatiently around her hips to drag her in hard against his body, one leg rising to trap her against him.

He's burning with heat, alive and beautiful and whole and there's no pain anymore and she digs her nails in to give it back because he needs it. He groans, not in protest, and her heart leaps in answer, something she couldn't articulate even if she wanted to. It curls in her belly like a nest of snakes even as she runs her hands in answer down his arms, sliding the material like water over his skin, coming back to rake over his exposed chest.

His mouth never leaves hers as he stands, fingers tightening cruelly on her waist. She can feel the urgency in his mind, in his body as he rumbles a sound so deep that it makes her hiss out her own response. She shoves her hands into his hair to position his mouth where she wants to be.

He lifts her then as if she weighs nothing at all and his mouth is at her throat, licking and biting. She clamps her thighs against his waist for stability and she's having a hard time telling where she ends and he starts now. She drags his mouth up for another drugged kiss, fists knotted in his hair. He tastes so good. So good.

He leans back, holding her above him as his kiss offers everything she's ever wanted. She drags her body inexpertly along his because if she doesn't touch more, touch hard, eat his power and his mouth alive she's going to die of it. His fingers dig into her legs bruisingly deep as she rocks against him again and again.

She doesn't even know what happens. He tears his mouth away, twisting and suddenly she's half under him, pressed into the cushions of the chair she'd forgotten about. There's no way to decipher the expression on his face other than raw and angry and something else again that might be desperation.

His weight settles implacably an instant later, one leg surging tight between hers, a hand tangling in her hair to pull her head back and his body moves with specific, hot intent into hers, once and brutally hard.

She cries out high and frightened, convulsing. So _good_. Yes, that, again. Please, _again_.

He does, driving between her legs, his mouth at her throat behind her ear and she cries out with astonishment as violent desire slams like a knife through her body. Yes, yes, please yes. _Kylo_. She writhes under the pressure, locking her hands into the fabric at his shoulders. _Again_.

The world stops only because he does.

She can hear her breathing, high and rapid, as fast as a bird's. His is no better, his face buried in her hair and everywhere they touch down the length of their bodies there's such an upwelling of need that she can't concentrate on any one thing. All of it, none of it, it's overwhelming. She can't catch her breath, so close to something that's buried just under his skin, in his body, the press of him so heavy, almost exactly where it needs to be to carry them both over the edge, any edge at all.

"Rey," he whispers finally. "Oh, fuck. Rey." One large hand curves so carefully over her hip then and there's such warmth, his fingers so gentle but she can feel the tangled compulsion to do more, harder, take and tear and be whole, be alive, to be _hers_, to be _his_, to _belong_.

She swallows it down, trying to find herself again and finally he drags his head up, bracing himself on his forearms to look down at her. Inching their bodies apart even that much feels so wrong that she whimpers.

"I want this," he growls and power streaks through both of them at the raw admission, she can feel his whole body against hers aching for completion, the sharp shiver that runs down his flesh as if somewhere he's been stung. The urge to move again, to keep moving. She tightens her hands and rocks. The sound he makes isn't human.

"Kylo," she breathes.

"I love it so much," he says as his forehead drops to her collarbone, "when you say my name. Want you, Rey. Need you. Fuck you, _have_ you. Saying my name because you can't think of anything else."

Her mouth welds itself shut because anything she says cannot possibly match the clawing feeling that's drowning both of them, dripping like honey. She breathes, holding perfectly still.

His breath tickles along her skin for untold minutes as she feels him wrestle for control. Finally he lifts his head and his hair is wild, sticking to his face. "But not. Not like this. Not... this way. But I could have... and I hadn't… I hadn't even kissed you yet." His hand moves then and hesitant fingertips stroke her face, trace the line of her lower lip in a tremble. "I wanted so much to kiss you."

She feels him struggling to pull everything back in, closing down the connection a thread at a time, his hand falling away to clench into a fist. She doesn't move, tries not to fight it. She can't… she can't help him do this but she can keep from crying out against it. His eyes bleed slowly back to brown and she bites her lip because she loves this face too, confused and pale and unsure but he's right, they shouldn't do this. Not this way, not because of fear.

She hasn't made this choice. Neither has he.

But it's only when he's mostly extricated himself that she's able to summon the will to shove him all the way out of her mind, snapping the gate down behind him. He rolls off her in that instant and then he's three strides away, giving her only his back. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes.

"Thank you," he says finally, half turning his head back. The curve of his cheek, the line of his eyelashes. "But you _really_ need to not be here now."

With a pained cry, she rolls off the chair on the other side and shreds the connection behind her to break them apart. It's the first time she'd ever done that too.

It's the first time he's ever asked her to leave and meant it.

She tumbles back into her world and there's blood on her clothes, in her mouth and it feels like it stains her hands red where she held him so tightly.


	20. forget

Rey stays outside for long enough that the tears dry. Long enough that her skin stops prickling with the worst of the heat and reaction and terrible, shaking aftermath. She stares without blinking at the wind scoured sky as if there might be answers for her there, if she only holds herself still long enough.

There are no answers for this. Only questions with edges that slice.

He'd told her she'd regret it and oh, he was right. She will always hate it when he's right. Yet in all this time, it hasn't once stopped her from asking him for things she should know better than to ever voice.

Her fault. Completely her fault. Because he has yet to lie to her and she has to _remember_ that.

She should not have touched him. No matter what she'd felt. No matter what she'd wanted. Touching him doesn't lead to anything she can ever admit to. But each time, every time, it seems so inevitable. As if having touched him once, she keeps circling helplessly back to that single moment, over and over and over again.

She thumps her head against the outbuilding wall she's sitting braced against, half hiding in the height of the unkempt summer grass. Thumps it again a little harder as if to impress the misery into her mind a little more. She shouldn't have done it. She should have stopped herself before it got that far. How, she's not sure, but there must have been a point where she could have chosen to step back, not forward, not to give in to the need to stay close, be closer, connect on every level possible. As if even sharing his mind couldn't possibly be enough for her.

She drops her head to her knees and bites her lip as the accusation blows through her again, scouring and relentless. Breathes it out carefully because she can't stop feeling it and she has to try. It'll be written all over her face like it feels imprinted on her body and she can't let anybody see this. Absolutely nobody can know this about her.

In the little darkness she's created, Rey tightens her fingers into careful fists. She's had his very life in her hands now. Tasted the furious beat of it in her mouth; sucked on it like some sort of blood red candy. Fed his anger with her own. Reveled with him in how pain becomes rage becomes limitless. Gave him _more_ just to feel it leap inside his veins.

And worse — somehow _worse_ — now she knows exactly what he tastes like. What he _feels_ like. The hard weight of him above her with the wreck of his voice digging into her very bones like a cancer, his teeth scraping against her skin. The desperate taste of him that she wants again so very, very badly.

No longer something she can only imagine alone in the dead of night. No longer something she can wonder innocently about.

She blows out shakily as if it's just that easy to dispel and unclenches her hands. Tilts her head back. Fixes her eyes on the sky once more and drinks in the alien color as she tells herself fiercely to forget.


	21. dream

It's been so long since he's had something so straightforward as a dream that he doesn't realize what it is until nearly the end.

It doesn't help that this is also memory twice over and real enough that he can taste the wine again in the back of his throat, old enough it seems to be allowed his own glass, young enough to worry at the brush of his hair on the back of his neck. It's been cut again and he's not sure he likes it but it's too late to worry about it now, not with her gentle hand on his shoulder and her quiet admonishment to behave himself and stand up straight and would it hurt to smile at the nice people.

He's young but in the dream as in reality he knows they're not nice. He's been told not to say it.

In this place his mother is there, so he tries. He doesn't hate himself yet for wanting to please so he holds sullen behind his teeth and listens to his name echo over and over again. There's no ceiling, just the swirling weight of the air so high over his head and he's hemmed in by color, by faces and teeth and the hot pinprick of nails on his shoulders.

They keep touching him. Over and over again, skin sliding over skin to trace patterns in delicate oil as if they are marking him, as if they are carving their names on him. The voices stick, getting caught like stains in the fine chambray of his new shirt and he runs his hand over it as if that can help make him clean again.

The disaster hugs the walls and he watches it out of the corner of his eye. It slides along a line of embroidery, it ducks under a table when he turns to look. A breath of a woman bends down and presses her lips to his face, a glitter of gold and rot and he catches the flash of darkness as it eels along the floor eagerly as if it, too, wants to sniff at it.

He's dressed in his father's colors. He can hear it in their minds, a slick recognition on their lips but when they look at him they think _mongrel_ and _mistake_ and he's proud of it and ashamed of it and in this not-place the wine in his glass never seems to go down.

The disaster is excited. It remembers this part. It's snuck close enough to nibble at his fingers as another woman touches his face and this one, this one he will always remember if only because she had eyes like the sea and she's beautiful in the way that his mother is not and ugly in all the ways that she is. This one smiles like all the others but this time, oh, this time, for the first time something trembles for it because while her mouth bends and her words say what they all say, her eyes are looking at his too short hair that he is pretty sure he doesn't like at all, at his too big hands that have never seemed to fit and her mind is thinking _mistake_ from the bottom of a pit of hunger.

It has nothing to do with him and everything to do with him. It twists inside and he can't breathe but she's gone, her hand on another man's arm and he has no idea what to do with it now. The glass trembles. All the glass trembles. The disaster slithers under his shirt and curls up in his stomach, lower, churning.

He's lost his mother and he's wandering, listening and none of the things he hears match what he does not hear and is not supposed to speak of. There's no one to tell him to smile anymore though, no reason to be good. He drinks the wine, sweet enough but her eyes were the sea and he wants them back.

If he is a mistake, he wants to know why she wanted to eat him for it.

A cold wind blows across the floor. The walls darken. He's gotten taller as he searches and the wine is gone. He's angry and his fists clench because he's been told to stop feeling and he doesn't want to, this is too new, too exciting, all jumbled up in edges he's never felt before. He likes this confusion, he wants to keep it. The disaster skitters around him, looking under things, peeking into doorways that open and close, searching, wanting.

Warm stone now instead of marble and his shirt is white not blue as he walks into another room and the walls echo, close in and the world is turning on its wheel just for him.

Out of nowhere perfume is a blind hand on his face, stroking, possessing, and then there's a wet mouth on his and a hand scratches down his chest and _mistake mistake mistake_ because this isn't what he wants, this isn't what he wants at all because this isn't right, it's not her, the wrong hunger, the wrong taste but oh, this _feeling_.

It takes and it breathes and it strokes him over and over again and the smell of it, of her hair tight on his skin like snakes, sea-green claws down his throat and spiking into his mind and the disaster is ecstatic, surging up to answer one blackness with another because what does it care for what he wants when this is what it needs.

He realizes he's dreaming, that this will be a nightmare soon enough if he doesn't wake up now before this goes any further.

He does.

He sits up in bed, sweat slicked and smelling a perfume decades gone, his pulse a drum in his temples. Everything his mind picked up in a whirlwind of agitation clatters to the ground as he regains control.

Kylo runs a hand over his face, trying to scrape off the sensation of illusory fingers.

Odd how these things can come back from graves so long ago forgotten.

He hasn't thought of it in years but it's not hard to figure out why he's dreaming of it now. What had he been? Thirteen? Maybe? Taller than his mother even then and old enough to balk at being trotted out at political functions but too young to know how to defend himself, how to shield himself from all the intrusive thoughts.

It's funny that he still remembers the color of her eyes though.

A polite kiss pressed to his cheek as her mind had stripped him where he stood and told him what she'd really wanted of Han Solo's son, trapped between the hammer of his mother's voice telling him to _be nice, Ben_ and all the parts of him that had woken up between one heartbeat and the next wanting to be everything but.

He grits his teeth and lays back down again, willing this older, wiser body to subside.

He is not a child anymore. He's given so much worse than what those desires had wanted of him, oddly innocent looking back considering all that came after.

He'd forgotten he even could dream. That's something at least.


	22. faith

He's lived his life trying to believe.

In something. Anything. A mother's love, a father's pride—a family's duty if that's what it takes. He gets through his days (he screams through his nights) trying so hard to believe that what he is was meant to be. That there is purpose to be found. That if he only searches deep enough he can find it.

He breaks everything he touches, looking.

He is shattered over and over and over again and finally he learns to shatter himself to speed up the process. Like kyber, broken and bleeding, infinitesimally brighter as he grinds it down and he moves further and further into darkness in order to see it better. Sifts through the fragments he is made of, trying to find the pieces that still glitter.

He is as he was born. He is as he was made. There must be a _reason_.

He still has hope, slivers of dust, when he finds it. Finds _her_. Feels her slide into him like poison even as he slides sweet as candy into her. If there is a hissing, shaking rage to discover that it was not inside all along, it is not as if he hasn't been disappointed in himself before. And would she be as she is if he was not as he was? He wonders sometimes in the void behind his eyes if she is the answer to him, or if he is the answer to her.

He breaks her and she breaks him back. Is that not everything? He feels their razor edges align as they slice into each other and it's so beautiful. It feels like dancing and everything bleeds.

She leaves.

She comes back.

It's so flawless. Pure, pulsating, so crystalline in her heart. It sings inside of his because it sings unchained inside of her and for the first time since never he keeps his fist away from it. Refuses to touch it. All things must be broken before he can know what they are meant for but this, this he doesn't know what to do with.

He's spent his entire life needing to know why, and this is his answer? A girl who knows nothing, who should hate everything, and doesn't.

He wants. To believe. In her belief, if in nothing else. After so long reaching in and down, tearing out everything he finds, he looks out. Her eyes stagger him where he stands.

This. This is the meaning for all of it. Not him. Never him. _Her_.

He throws everything away so that his hands will be free.

At the end he discovers what forbearance earns him. He reaches out, holding the best of the pieces he has scavenged from all the blood and wreckage he's waded through, and it buys him nothing. He believes but she turns and wants something else, someone else. The tears on her face, it seems, are for others.

Not him. Never him. Oh, it will never be him.

He has lived so many years in darkness and can now measure a bare handful of black gloved minutes where he knew what he was meant for. And they are over.

She leaves.

She does not come back.

When he stands there is still death and destruction because that, at least, never changes. He could not kill her as it seems she could not kill him and his first rudderless act drops a man to his knees because if there is meant to be nothing at the end, it is best to get started.

He leaves hope on the ground along with the bodies.

The galaxy learns to scream with his voice.


	23. mistake

It's his mistake, really.

Then again, isn't it always his mistake? All the ones he can never seem to avoid making, over and over and over again. They pile up like corpses.

(He wishes they were. The dead at least burn on the pyres he's made of them, giving off light in the darkness. His mistakes stay stubbornly alive and scratch him awake in the middle of the night.)

This time the problem is, maybe because the problem _always _is, is that he reacts so fast.

He can't say it's a bad thing, this thing inside that retaliates like lightning. It's kept him alive. Sane even, for some relative value of holding himself together. He'd certainly be dead a half dozen times over by now if he'd even once hesitated, and it's probably much too late to change this about himself now. Assuming he'd even want to. Which he doesn't.

He will always make his best mistakes at light speed.

He is still, after all, his father's son.

Later he'll blame himself for it. Will break a wall on his fist for it as if that could possibly help, but that will be then. Now is simply now and it unfolds like a flower in the smoke and shouting and chaos, so meltingly close it's a nova of brightness in his mind. He's already judged and adjudicated it before awareness even knows anything's changed.

His fingers gripped tight on his saber, lunging forward and all he knows is that it's not an enemy which means it _belongs to him_ and he's already halfway folded himself around it, shoving it into alignment with all the rest before rational thought even flickers.

Then he gets a full taste of what he's found and he roars with hunger.

Inhales her light. Swallows her whole into his maw because in that instant of her faltering confusion as the link flares he can. He yanks her mind hard against his as if they are indeed lovers, locking mental fingers around it like she's given him her throat.

Hasn't she? Oh, he wants her throat under his hand so desperately.

_Oh, beloved._

_Do you remember this? _

He's already halfway through the terminus and he doesn't slow.

He swallows down the scrabbling panic pressed against his chest with something that might be satisfaction, edged with satiation for _he _is now _they _and if he'd ever once been asked, this is how he would have wanted it to be. So much fear in the whistle of breath that only he can hear and and the sudden, frantic rejection of death that his mask cannot possibly filter out because it's all in his head, forever and ever in his head.

He slices through the cheaply defended throat, burning through the armor like tissue. A dream, this. He'd shown her once how it could be, how it's meant to be.

_Do you remember? _

This time the blood is beautifully real. It spills over his black arm in the spin so perfectly imperfect because now there is both impact and weight to account for, that the ground isn't practice room smooth, that his arms and shoulders are distantly screaming with the hours of strain.

Yet the body collapses out of his way because it can do nothing else. A choreographed faint on this scorched ballroom floor, a fit of vapours no one recovers from.

_Do you?_

His blade isn't meant for that move; too long by a foot or more, the quillons as much a danger to him as to anyone else but he is nothing if not willing to burn when needed. He makes it work because he can. Because he wants to. Because this is the only human contact he can ever be permitted.

There's another right behind the one that's still falling and his saber's out of alignment now but he's a monster and always has been, a beast in the shape of a shadow as he takes the necessary step and explodes in the half turn that smashes his fist in a backhand.

_Remember. _

Another body falls and while this one might get back up again at some point, its face will be in pieces.

Her shocked breath exhales through his lungs. He keens with her mouth.

He's half here, black boots on the cracked floor, the wound that is his saber a living creature in his hand; half grounded in the form named for claws and teeth and fury. The rest of him is spread across the entire conflict like a dark wing with no less than ten companies under his dominion and all of him is howling with distortion and delight as he surges forward for more.

He lashes her tight to his heart and feeds her light into all of it.

He's across the next invisible line and there's more room now and his saber shrieks, howls and he stomps with one foot to make the ground quake and pins another body like a butterfly as it staggers.

There are three more just for him. He falls out of vaapad for a heartbeat as his movements pull him near another wall torn and barely holding together and blaster fire streaks through. Futile retaliation as he catches most of the energy in one hand, splashes it to the floor as if it's water. It shocks his arm though and the pain is welcome. Feeds that as well into the gestalt he's made of himself, giving it away like a gift.

Feels the wounded struggle to rise, to inhale pain as he does, to drive forward.

Two. He hates being on the defensive, the whirling shield of body and blade that is the hallmark of soresu and he's not good at it but he's already maintaining so much. Then he's back in cover again and the slide back into fury feels like coming home.

One.

None.

Has he ever had a home? The best he's ever been able to manage is this one, singular feeling as the leviathan inside him finds completion.

And suddenly there is silence.

For a glorious heartbeat it's the same stillness. She is here. Her heart trembles with his in victory. He feels his name ghosting across her lips and in this moment he doesn't care which one she uses.

The gray and black uniforms on the ground shift to red. The scarred stone under his feet streaks to mirrored black. There is blood in his mouth and she is _here _and they are together and this. This is _everything_.

He breathes in and breathes out and lets it go.

The smoke from everything that's burning makes vision a guess more than a reality. There's grit under his heels. His body feels wonderfully bruised. At some point he had a platoon around him but he outstripped them somewhere. No matter.

_Do you see me? Feel me._

He stretches out with one gloved hand and listens. So many fireflies of near light carried upon, carried away on his ocean of dark. The shifting bleakness that is Zara, moving swiftly at the perimeter. She is intent on something, her bloodlust a taste under his own tongue if he concentrates. Kato is motionless in contrast somewhere far to the left, an oil slick of shifting intentions.

They haven't taken as much as they should have by this point. Why is Kato not moving? He throws fear forward in a lapping wave through all the minds linked to his to lock enemy hands to suddenly frozen weapons, to cleave tongues to mouths gone dry.

Links the pulse of his purpose in a chain through everything he holds, driving them all forward like ants.

His breath is harsh. Metallic. It rings against the walls.

"Kylo. Kylo, no. Let go. Let me _go_."

Finally. It couldn't last. It will never last as she starts to struggle against him, scrambling now to get away. Her power rises in surging spikes as she tries to work her way free of him, pulling like taffy.

He growls and turns his head.

Her eyes are wide and oh, so panicked. She's so bright in his vision. So beautiful.

It takes hard effort to release his grip. The heated feeling of rightness slides away inexorably as she claws herself back into separateness, retreating to the edge of his mind. The world darkens and he tells himself not to miss it.

He tightens his grip on the rest in retaliation as the light fades.

"What's the matter, scavenger? I know you've been in a fight before."

"Nothing like… like _that!_"

He would laugh if that was something he did. "Oh? Well, perhaps not exactly like that." He lowers his saber and tilts his head. Swallows his feelings like knives with very limited success.

Somewhere on the left they've broken through whatever they were fighting; he can feel feet running unopposed, a tight cohesion loosening. There are pockets of struggle ahead somewhere. The pressure is not intense enough for him to care so he lets it wash through him. "Did you enjoy it?"

"No," she replies, her cheeks flushed. "Yes? Void take me, _maybe_. What was… what _was _that?"

He spins his saber. "Something I already regret showing you," he manages finally.

Zara's now stopped hard and he can all but see her mask twisted to look to where he stands, as if that alone could bring her sight. She's felt the power surge and then the schism and Kylo curses under his breath. Kato is finally moving but it's a looping path through the wreckage not forward but back to him. Zara's attention sticks to his skin like a burr and she's a half heartbeat behind her dark brother from making the same decision.

He's going to have two Knights of Ren on top of him in mere minutes.

"I've never felt anything like that before," she admits because of course she knows nothing of what's going on. "It's overwhelming. I can… I can _still _feel it. Kylo, what are you doing?"

There's a prickle of cold like fingernails along his spine whispering of just what he's just shown her in the heat of his excitement, in the battle frenzy of his mind that grabs for everything it can reach. Not that it should matter. She is _years _away from the discipline necessary, the rigid control needed to maintain this many connections without draining herself to desiccation in the process, losing her mind, losing herself in the flux points of power and demand.

But he's underestimated her before. He's said it before. What moves through him moves through her in a continuous ouroboros loop. He can do this because he is as he was born, as he was made, and he has more than earned this mastery, one bloody, brutal step at a time.

And all she has to do is find it in him, like picking fruit from a branch. It's enough to make him howl.

He grits his teeth as he feels her reaching back tentatively along all the pathways she just vacated, her mental touch tinged with fascination. Her _curiosity _of all things as her fear starts to recede while he just stands here.

He should shove her away. He should slam the link closed. He should make sure this is not something she takes from him, as she's taken so many things. Cut her off at the very root before the Knights get here because he has absolutely no idea how his link to her is perceived through his link to them with the hinge that he is making of himself.

Yet. She is here. The slide of her mind so bright against his, even in something as brushing as this as she tries to touch without touching. Take without taking. To ask, as always, without asking.

His war dogs are spiraling in closer and closer and Kylo closes his eyes behind his mask. Decides that yes, sometimes he can choose to make his mistakes as slow as he wants to.

He doesn't so much relax as he stops resisting the intrusion. Permits her to join him again so loosely it's a drift of dust in the air and just about as substantial. Easy enough to stand at the edge of himself where they touch so carefully to show her the web he's built, the keystone at the center that he's made of himself.

"I can feel them all through you. So many. So _bright_." Her fingers twitch at her side, half raised as if part of her wants to stroke along what she sees in his mind. With painful clarity he remembers the bite of them sliding through his hair, the anchor that was her grip. The taste of her mouth as power moved through them both.

Some of that must drift back for her expression softens and her lips part. He turns his head and distracts himself, distracts them both by turning more of his attention to the fighting all around them.

"The Jedi used this, as did the Sith," he says softly. "The… technique… was lost, but Snoke had me meditate on how it could be done." He licks the back of his teeth and keeps the rest of it far away from her. She does not need to know. "Skywalker never used it. I doubt he knew much more than the potential for it used to exist."

He would move closer to her if it did not mean stepping over the dead. He shrugs his shoulders. Considers the rest of it.

Why make just one mistake? And for once, for just this once, she's excited to listen to him. Her eyes are eager enough, her mind latched onto his as she tries to explore through him.

He allows himself to touch her mind more strongly, calling her attention softly to the junction points as if they have all the time in the world, as if he doesn't feel the converging darkness travelling through the threads he's holding. "A secret, for you, if you want it. I believe your General touches this sometimes, in her own way. She fumbles of course, trying to link herself to her favorite people. I feel it when she is… close. I doubt she knows what she's doing."

They are separated by mere meters and light years of distance but he trembles when her mental fingers pluck at a single string of his attention. She wants. And oh, as always, he wants to give. He'd give her everything if he could.

So many mistakes, one after the other like dominoes.

He reaches out and enfolds her again, one more time. This time he's gentle, sets her in her place next to him and reforges her connection to it.

Together they watch the light stream out across the web of all that he is, all that he holds, rising higher and higher like white froth on an ocean storm.

_Do you feel this? _

Her answer is more breath than sound.

_Yes._

_Remember this. _

_Yes. _

Kato is nearly on top of them. He can actually hear the other man's boots now, making no attempt at stealth as if that would ever be a question. Zara is but seconds behind and her interest is a swirl of heat and harpoon sharpness.

He brushes his mind against Rey's, a hesitant kiss of intention before she can protest and cuts the link without any more warning than that.

Kylo braces himself, glad at least that his saber is still lit.


	24. patience

"Patience, Ben. Concentrate."

"I am… ow!"

He tries to get back into position, he really does, but no sooner does he start to get his feet back under him, his hip and arm stinging with the strikes, than he's hit again and it's too much.

He tears off the muffling headwrap and glares first at the hovering training remotes that all managed to tag him that time and then back at his uncle.

Luke simply leans on his staff and fixes Ben with a look.

"You're distracted."

"It's not fair. How am I supposed to defend from three different angles at once?"

"That's what you're here to figure out. And you're still distracted. Focus, Ben. Patience."

"Yah, Benn, pashence."

He whips his head to glare at Jovi. The older student has an appropriately encouraging expression but the newer padawans in the rough circle around him are obviously trying to muffle giggles.

The scowl on his face feels permanently embedded, in utter contrast to the bright sunny day overhead and the grassy practice field they're all standing in. He weaves his lightsaber in an agitated circle, feeling the sweat prickle between his shoulder blades from the rising afternoon heat and wishing he was allowed to practice this alone. Why the kriff is his uncle making them all do this with an audience? He knows he's not good at the defensive forms and he's never going to get good at them if he has to have people staring at him while he works on it.

He's not allowed to just crush the drones, they don't have minds to read, and he's not allowed to see. He's not even allowed to just dodge the things. No, he has to stand here like a big, smelly bantha with his too long arms, trying to deflect the low level energy blasts using the soresu forms while simultaneously managing not to tag anybody else with the beams he manages to scatter. Which so far hasn't been that many of them.

It's stupid. Even the littlest ones are better at it than he is and making him stand here over and over again _demonstrating _his lack of skill is stupid. He wants to deflect one right into Jovi's pretty face and see how they like it.

Luke takes a deep breath and just because it's controlled doesn't mean that Ben doesn't feel the sigh that his Master is trying to hold back.

"You're getting angry."

Ben opens his mouth and then snaps it closed again. What's the point? Yes, he's angry. This is humiliating and Luke keeps calling him out on it like he's supposed to be okay with it.

In answer, he jams the helf-helmet back on his head, knowing in a deep, festering place that it makes his stupid hair wing out at the sides like he's about to take flight and no doubt Jovi will have a comment on _that _as well later. He resets his stance, raises his lightsaber and reaches hard into the Force.

It's funny. He's been frustrated many times before now, this isn't the first time he's had to stand in the center of a bunch of eyes and be forced to show everyone that he's not the best at everything. But this time when he grabs for the connection that he hopes will let him know what's coming in time to angle his newly awkward body into enough of the right katas so that Luke will _finally _let him out of this circle, he punches right through to something else.

It's like shattering a glass pane he didn't even know was there. For a second he simply flounders on unsteady mental footing as his perception expands, folds in on itself and then explodes.

He still can't see. But he doesn't have to.

He can smell the grass they're standing on with such razor edged clarity that it's painful.

He has no idea where the Marksmen drones are, exactly, but it really doesn't matter anymore. He's excruciatingly aware of everything around him in the most complex lattice he's ever seen. Even if he can't _see _it.

He can feel them. It. Crawling. Building.

They have no minds but there is _intent_. They're tracking him and he's somehow… tracking them back.

He feels them firing.

He feels his face split into a snarl.

Because now he knows. He can _feel _it. This really isn't fair.

There are three droids and there is no soresu form that he knows that could deflect them all. Not at the angles they are starting to fire down on him at. He could possibly manage two but one of the deflections will almost definitely strike someone in the circle around him and the third is going to hit his lower leg if he goes into the stance that would do it anyways.

He doesn't bother to try to understand what he's just done, he just considers it all in gestalt with this new lightning awareness. The person he'll scatter the beam into won't be Jovi and by the time he figures what angle would get him that satisfaction, the possibility is already gone.

No matter. He can do it next time.

The win scenario flickers across his mind. Can't crush the droids. Fine. Can't use his eyes. Don't need them now. Must use soresu. But now he knows now that soresu makes it impossible to win.

The beams are already halfway to him while he's been thinking.

He lowers his saber and thrusts out his hand.

The energy just… stops moving.

Ben tangles the lattice around the quivering beams more tightly, unsure if they can wiggle free. Inspects it warily but it seems okay.

The drones must have moved again to get into another position because he can feel them charging once more. Who needs to read minds when even machines run on parameters he can taste through the Force?

He catches those too.

The third time they fire, he sees the perfect pattern forming and swings his saber to catch the one bolt that will finally deflect exactly where he wants it to go.

"Stop!"

This time when he paws the head covering off his face, nobody is trying to giggle. He glances at the frozen bolts in a cage around him and nods. Perfect. He flexes his fingers and feels the ripples of it as the lattice flexes with him but nothing lets go.

It doesn't hurt to hold them although he can already feel the drain. He routes it absently into the ground, bringing more power up where his feet contact the dirt to replace it. He has no idea why he didn't try to do this before, it's so much easier than working with a form that was going to fail anyways.

"You didn't use soresu, Ben. And you hit another student."

He looks over and yes, Jovi is a few paces back and still wincing in pain, one hand over their face. Hopefully it'll bruise as a reminder but he probably won't be that lucky. The training bolts are meant to sting, not injure.

He ignores the accusation itself because it's true. He did. And it seems barely adequate but he'll take it.

"Soresu doesn't work for this. You've programmed the droids to make sure it doesn't."

He looks back at his uncle then, wondering if he'll even admit it. But after a moment the older man nods.

"Yes. Well done. Class, what Ben said is true. Soresu is ineffective against this program if you stick to the actual forms you've been learning. The purpose of this session is to discover that soresu _isn't_ always going to be the answer to blaster fire and when and how to break the forms if you have to."

There is a murmur of agreement that runs through the rest as heads bob in acknowledgement of the lesson.

"You can let them go now, Ben."

He breathes and considers it. Another test? Of course it's another test.

He caught most of them at the point of origin but the first couple were nearly on him before he figured out what he wanted to do. One red beam is quivering less than an inch off his shoulder.

Energy is everywhere. The lattice he sees may or may not exist because his mind needs something to conceptualize what the Force is but it's working for now and he'll think on it more later. Away from everyone else, very far away from his uncle who now he knows was just setting him up to look stupid in front of everybody.

He clenches his hand into a fist and attempt to drain it all down into the earth since that seems easiest. It doesn't quite work and the residual splash makes him flinch as it crawls back up his ankles. He's not the only one and this time the murmuring is less reverential as everyone shifts from the uncomfortable tingle. He hides the smirk.

Let's see any of them try _that._

"Pavir'se, you're next. Now that you know Form III isn't going to work, let's see what you can come up with under pressure." His master takes a breath as if he's going to say something else, then shakes his head. "Let me know when you're ready to start."

Ben powers down his saber and tosses the helmet to the advancing zelosian student, moving to take his place in the circle as a potential target. Jovi's dropped their hand and is glaring at him, a nice red welt right between their eyes and Ben tries not to enjoy it too much.

Ben keeps his head down and tells himself the fear in his uncle's eyes is just annoyance at having his lesson figured out so soon.


	25. jörmungandr

Sitting has only delayed the inevitable.

Not that he's ever been one to give in gracefully to anything, least of all his own weaknesses. He could blame it on pride if that hadn't been beaten out of him years ago to make room for all encompassing necessity. Pride is for lesser creatures, who have the autonomy to care about their little victories, their lukewarm defeats. No matter how strong he gets, it's never going to be enough.

Sometimes, like now, he wonders if he simply fights everything because it's about the only thing left of who he used to be.

This is the part of him that Snoke had needed to correct the least. This is the part of him that had paved the way for all the rest. He's been wrong from the day he was born, after all, possibly from the very moment he was conceived and it still took, what, how many years? Before he finally understood that there was no getting away from himself.

Of all the things that will never be said about him, no one will ever know that he fought to the last to try.

Kylo licks the blood off his teeth. Stares blankly at the ceiling. It's a familiar taste — comforting even — without the attendant terror behind it. Just pain. Just hurt. Self inflicted, self administered, self... correcting. The wall at his back provides support he's not sure he could do without at this point.

All he knows is that the fault in his blood is too deep to eradicate, that poison glitters at his core no matter how deep he cuts or how hard he tries to excise it. Skywalker would have had him believe it was his anger. Snoke would have had him believe it was his leniency. They're both dead so he supposes it doesn't matter anymore what they had to say on the subject of which part of him, specifically, he was supposed to destroy.

If he closes his eyes, he can probably still see the exact moment when everything he'd tried so desperately to believe about himself fell apart into cataclysm. And this is not that. This is nothing close to that. But so many things are irresistible when he hurts this badly, because if there's one thing he knows with certainty, it's that there's nothing that hurts that he cannot make hurt more.

He begins the collapse, the slow slide and it still takes a moment before he realizes what's going on. He puts a hand down to stop himself and wonders stupidly after a moment why he thought to bother. He blinks at the back of the half glove he has on, long fingers spread wide on the bloody floor as if it can provide answers.

It doesn't.

He pulls himself back to straight again after a moment because it seems the thing to do. His breath hisses out between clenched teeth even as sweat breaks out again across his shoulders.

It feels like somebody tried to carve his heart out through his ribcage with a laser torch, which isn't actually too far off reality. Perhaps, he acknowledges, he might have had the settings on the hunter droids a little high. Then again, they're all in pieces and while so is he, he'll be getting up eventually and they most certainly will not.

Pride, no, never pride, but he can have as much spite as he can swallow.

Still, he tells himself he has no interest in becoming one with the floor as tempting as it may be. Precariously balanced again, he drags his leg up on his least damaged side to brace one booted foot flat to the floor. Ignores the answering shriek of protest for the movement to tilt his head back against the cool metal. Listens to the air beat furious wings against his ears.

He really should stand up. Move. Walk as far as he needs to, find his quarters, a fresher, silence. Wrap the animal hurt around his bones like another layer of muscle and use it to tear his no doubt clot-welded undershirt away from whatever he's done this time, inspect the damage he's inflicted more carefully. Maybe even use some bacta because it's not like there's anyone left to refuse him the relief.

Of all the things, that is the thought that finally tightens the life in his throat, makes it hard to breathe.

So many wounds he's never been allowed to heal.

But he could, now. If he wanted to.

Does he want to? All pain is meant for a purpose, his most of all. Every victory another scar, visible or otherwise. Every defeat another lesson, building strength out of every one of his failures. His body is littered with the reminders of how many he has.

Certainly Snoke never granted him respite so why should he reward himself with it now? If he has learned anything from walking in the darkness, it's that he can't carve away the pieces that are unnecessary without causing damage. Even his. Especially his. Although his master would have smashed him to the floor long before now and kept him there for this useless wallowing.

Yet even that caustic thought doesn't motivate him to move. Snoke is dead. Snoke is in _pieces_. Snoke is nothing more than dust and ash sweetly mixed in with all the rest of the things he's survived. He can only wish Skywalker were there too but that particular trophy will forever be lost to him. Even if he'd found her ocean planet, there likely would have been nothing there to bring back.

Hopefully his undershirt is soaking up the worst of it this time. At least the floor is black enough to disguise every sin he carries.

Kylo drifts for awhile, permitting his mind to flick in and out as it sees fit, idly caressing then losing the life forces of those around him in the ship. He can feel his ribs grinding with each breath, which helps. The pulse of warm then cool as blood sluggishly continues to seep. This one will likely scar, whether he opts for bacta or not, he can feel it. No matter. He will give himself new ones until he finally learns all that his skin can hold.

He really should get up before he passes out like a child.

This, of course, is the moment when the unwelcome echo giggles in his ear. The copper in his mouth takes on the tang of electricity.

No.

Everything pushes closer and for a faltering second he wants to blame it on blood loss. The deliberately dull color of the training room sparks, flares, and then the universe starts to settle in his lungs like he's swallowed feathers.

_No_.

He tries to shove it back before it can get any closer but this always seems to catch him when he's least able to deal with it and the Force shrugs him off like a matchstick lit against a firestorm. He's suddenly, stupidly grateful that he hadn't actually tried to stand in the last few minutes since the last thing he needs right now is for the Jedi pretender to catch him staggering.

He locks his jaw and waits for the pieces to snap together.

Will it _never_ give up? It's as if the unending abyss that threads through reality is nothing but a petulant toddler with its toys, smashing the pair of them together over and over again as if unhappy that they have yet to kill each other.

He shoves against his braced foot to force his spine straighter against the wall. The blaze of pain is excruciating, a spike of agony lancing up his neck to widen his eyes and jolt him back into a semblance of coherence. He will not appear weak to her. He will not.

This time he seems to be more _there_ than _here_ in a turnabout way that he's never going to be prepared for no matter how often this happens.

Wherever she is, it's dark. Oddly enough she's seated as well but the mirror they make ends there. Against his loose, ungainly sprawl, she's pulled up tight, legs crossed at the ankles with slim knees pulled to her chest, her cloth bound arms hugging them to her body. Defensive. Rigid.

Not that he blames her because this time they're almost close enough that he could tap his outstretched foot against her ankle if he wanted to. Artificial, heartbreaking closeness.

She keeps her gaze steadfastly down, her eyelashes a dark smudge because of course this is a time she is going to refuse to acknowledge him.

He takes a slow breath. Then another.

A soft series of colored lights flicker and play across her sharp features but the rest is in shadow. Near a control panel probably. The walls she's touching are dark metal, riveted and banded, showing their age along warped seams and he can all but smell the rust and corrosion from here. If he had to guess, she's wedged herself into a corner in one of the cargo holds on his father's ship, but it could equally well be some ramshackle Rebel base from decades ago.

His mind is always trying to paint his father's influence over everything like a particularly obnoxious smell he can't seem to get away from. A Rebel base he decides then out of pique.

Her hair is pulled back as always, as severe and austere as always, and this time no soft tendrils have escaped to play along her ears and neck. He finds he misses those. They often tease along her skin where sometimes he likes to imagine his fingers could be.

He tilts his head in unconscious mimicry of what he'd like her to do.

Gently. He'd touch her so gently.

Does she never sleep? Even in the gloom the circles under her eyes look exhausting and her posture, jammed tight into her corner, speaks even more volumes.

She has nothing in her hands and that is perhaps the most telling thing of all. She's always busy. Always doing, always being, always moving as if to stop would be the worst of all possible things. She attacks, she pushes, she forces herself on him over and over, demanding things she has no right to demand, asking things she has no right to ask. This is possibly the first time he's ever been yanked halfway across reality only to find her adrift and silent.

She keeps her head down. She has to know how close he is this time. It's prickling all over his skin even if he's in no condition to do a thing about it.

The minutes tick by and the connection mutely refuses to close as he listens to her breathe, falling into the rhythm of it. They're getting better at this, he supposes. She has yet to launch into another loud accusation of his many failings according to her perspective. He hasn't even thought about Force grabbing for his lightsaber, assuming that he could do anything with it without tearing himself open again.

He licks his teeth.

"What is it, scavenger? Can't sleep? Or just hiding?" He pitches his voice down and low, quiet enough that he hopes she hears nothing in it that he doesn't want her to. She hunches a little more as he breaks the silence.

"Go away."

"Eventually, yes."

"You're the last person I want to see right now."

"I'm sure I'm the last person you want to see, ever."

Her mouth, normally so mobile with expression, twitches and then stills. "True."

He breathes out with the reflexive anger because he can taste the evasiveness in the Force currents building between them. Yes, but... no? He looks again at her still fingers.

"What's wrong?"

"Funny you should ask."

She can put so much disgust into so few syllables. "What do you mean?"

"Everything is wrong. Absolutely _everything_ is wrong. And it's all your fault, Ren."

Okay, perhaps he was too hasty in his hope that this conversation might go differently than most of the others. Just his title now? Not even his first name?

He presses his arm tighter to his side and tilts his head as if in contemplation.

"I'm not responsible for everything that can go wrong everywhere, scavenger. Although I know you'd like to think I am."

"Your mother. Is dying."

"I'm sure she is."

She finally lifts her head to glare at him. And oh, he's seen that expression before so many times. Furious and trying not to be, as if swallowing her own feelings will keep her from reacting to them. But the anger burns clean and bright so close to the surface and he can feel how she wants it to leap across the small distance to burn him too.

He would welcome it. So different from his own and so much the same. He watches as she strangles on it before finally giving in, her fingers curling into claws.

"Fine. You're just going to sit there and tell me you don't care. She's your _mother_."

"Is that supposed to mean something to me? It certainly seems to mean something to you since you keep _reminding_ me that she and I shared a placenta. I haven't actually forgotten, you know. It's just not relevant."

"I do not. I do not understand you." She scrubs the heel of one impatient hand against her eye. Her gaze doesn't waver from his though, as if once she raised her head she wasn't going to let him go. "How can I not understand you? I don't even have to close my eyes now to know where you are and you… you make no sense to me."

"Oh? And where am I, then?"

Irritation or its cousin flashes across her face and she jams a finger in the air, pointing. "There. There is where you are from me."

He's never thought to try and know where she is. Curiosity moves sluggishly through his thoughts. "Is that the problem? That it doesn't come with a set of coordinates and a battle plan attached?"

Her lips compress. He tells himself it's for laughter. He will pretend because he likes that he might have given her something to smile about.

It's fleeting, whatever it is.

"How can you sit there and tell me that you don't care that your mother is dying? I have to stand here and watch her fade day by day and nothing seems to help, and she's getting weaker and weaker and I can't… I can't _do_ anything about it. About _any_ of it."

Her hand lowers to gesture, rough and frustrated, although he's not sure precisely what she's trying to encompass or even it's centered on his mother at all. Rey is nothing if not good at talking about one thing while she hurts for another. But he can still feel her heart bleeding with cracked emotion. He wishes he couldn't.

"Then let it go, little sand rat. Everyone dies. You, me. Her. If it helps, she's outlived most of her enemies which is more than many accomplish."

"I wish…" she starts but then she tightens her lips around the rest. She glances away finally, fingers picking at the fabric bunched at her knee.

"Wish what?" he prods gently.

Her dark gaze locks back on him again in the gloom. She takes a breath.

"I wish you weren't her enemy."

I wish you were here. He exhales as calmly as he can even though her triphammer pulse is threatening to drag him somewhere he is utterly certain he does not want to go.

"I'm not."

"Right. The same way you didn't hate your father."

"But I didn't hate him."

Her head thumps back against the wall in the darkness once, then twice. Her hands fist then open. "I do not. Understand you," she whispers finally and he can hear the pain lacing the edges, thin as a razor. "I feel you under my skin like an infection and nothing you say ever makes sense."

The best part is, the worst part is that he knows exactly what she means. She's a blaze along his nerves, hot and sweet as honey and he shrugs, folding the hurt into his shields. "If it helps, I hated Skywalker. I still do. If I could bring him back, I would, if only so I could watch him throw himself away for a second time when he realizes his doomed last stand changed nothing."

"If you don't… don't hate them, then why did you do it? You've never, ever answered me."

Something about the earnestness in her tone, in her shadowed eyes, her skin light years away and close enough to touch, ripples across his heart. He can feel his face twisting with answering emotion and he can't lock it down fast enough. Her eyes focus like a hawk and she leans forward suddenly as if proximity alone will drag the answers out of him, legs half dropping from her hold on them.

His back is against a wall and he cannot even stand.

"Why did I kill Han Solo? Why did I go to the Dark?"

Why did he stay there.

She nods mutely and if he understands nothing else, he knows what fear looks like as it washes across her face. What does she think he's going to tell her?

"Tell me what you know about the Force," he deflects.

Somehow that is the thing that startles her into laughter, brief as it is and he blinks at her, arrested by the completely unexpected sound. She chuffs, half looking away, seemingly as surprised as he is. "Luke asked me that too," she says after a moment, looking quickly at her fingers. "I had a terrible answer."

He can feel his mouth quirking. "Do you have a better one now?"

"No. Maybe."

"Tell me then. The Force, what is it?"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Answer the question, Rey."

She licks her lips at that, her eyes flicking back to his and he refuses to react to the slip. Her name on his lips always affects him. It seems to affect her which might be worse. He lets her think as long as she needs to, flexing his hand, arm, shoulder to ripple the pain to keep his mind as clear as he can. That was stupid.

"Fine. The Force… keeps things together and it tears things apart. It's like it keeps falling in and then falls out just as fast." A frown crosses her face even as a streak of yellow touches her hair. "It isn't a thing at all. I can't describe it with words. There are no words. It just... is. A feeling of rightness. Or when something's wrong."

"Not too terrible. Better than my first answers anyways."

"What did you think it was?"

"I'm not telling you that. I was a precocious child and you might laugh again and we can't have that." Her mouth twitches and a glimmer of blue light hits her cheek so sweetly that his breath stutters. He ploughs on. "Is the Force Light or Dark?"

"It's both," she returns promptly.

"Is it?"

"Isn't it?"

"I'm asking you. You've reached into it. You've reached into it through me even. You've bent it to your will. Do you feel the Light in it? The Dark?"

The uncertain crease he's grown to know so well settles between her eyebrows. The continuous flicker of lights dances in her eyes as her gaze unfocuses and he can feel her reaching out as if she can discern the answer simply by looking.

Maybe she can. She's as strong as he is, after all.

"The Force," she finally breathes. "I don't. I don't know. I can feel life in the Force. I feel the destruction. I feel _you_. But I don't… know."

"The Force is. The Force will always be. Planets, systems, galaxies; they rise, they fall. And the Force cares nothing absolutely nothing for what you would call Light, what I would call Dark."

"But I can _feel_ it in you. So much. So much Dark. Under everything, under all of it. You're always so angry."

_Feed the hate_, a voice whispers and it's almost unrecognizable at this point. He lolls his head against the wall, watching her with half closed eyes. _Embrace it. Use it_.

And he does. Oh, he does. The only thing beneath the rage after all is the void and he is pretty sure the day he swallows that all the way down, what comes up will not be him anymore.

"And I see the Light in you," he murmurs. He can't help himself. He will never be able to help himself when it comes to her. Right up until the moment she puts her blade through his heart, he won't be able to help himself. "You shine, Rey. Like a thousand stars, you _shine_. You're so beautiful and you don't even see it."

Even in the shadow she's hidden herself away in he can see the blush streak across her skin. She twitches uncomfortably, shifts back infinitesimally to put distance between them again, more emotional than physical.

His answering exhale is more tremble than sound. He wants to do that to her again. She opens her mouth and then closes it before glancing away.

"You're still not answering my question."

He takes a deliberate breath, expands his ribs so bone grates on bone. The surge is the sickening taste of wood in his teeth and he shoves it into his fraying shields, already starting to come down again because every part of him wants her closer.

"Ask anyone on any world what the Force is and they'll tell you, if they believe anything at all, that the Light is _good_. Forgiveness, mercy, all things sweet and beautiful. Sunrises, the laughter of children I suppose. And every one of them would be wrong." He would lean forward if he could, but settles for keeping his eyes trained on hers. "The Force is life, everywhere. The Force is death, _everywhere_. You feel it. The same as I do."

"I do." Her agreement is small and cautious but he latches onto it. She is the only one that could possibly understand, could see the truth that he sees.

"The Hosnian system died to Starkiller. Like Alderaan died to the first Death Star. I expect it was much the same both times. So many creatures, ripped from one state into the other within seconds. I felt it. Every one of those lives that were awake, they screamed as they saw it coming and I heard them _all_." He takes a breath. "But it was a pebble tossed into an ocean. The Force cares nothing either way."

"No. That's wrong. You're wrong. You can't know what the Force wants. The Force would never have wanted all those people to die." She's already shaking her head.

"I didn't say that it wanted them to die. I'm saying it doesn't care."

"That's not true. You can't know that."

"Of course I can, scavenger. You know I can."

"You're lying." She says it and he can already feel the retraction in her heart. As if he could, as if he would ever want to. She hurries on. "The First Order… _you_ did that. You can't tell me that destroying those worlds wasn't wrong and evil."

"You can call it evil if you want. Hux oversaw the project, Snoke ordered it used. I asked for more time, if that makes you feel any better, but my Master wanted to send a message that couldn't be ignored. Obey or be destroyed. It might also have flushed out Skywalker from his bolt hole."

"And that's somehow _not_ evil?" Her lips have pursed into something he expects is somewhere between horror and disappointment and exasperation, a melange of feelings he always seems to inspire in her.

"The First Order does not exist to be passive, scavenger. Weapons are built to be used and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar." His mind's eye paints again the mindless thrust, the blood red ruin streaking against the blackness. "For my part, I stood on the bridge and watched it happen. For my part, I bore witness. Because yes, they did not need to die and all life is precious. And life is also irrelevant. Theirs were. Hers will be."

Could he have caught it? The cracked urge had burrowed like maggots into his mind at the time. It was only energy after all, tunneling and twisting, the world serpent brought to hellish life eating through folded space. Nearly a sun's worth, yes, but what was a sun to the Force?

He will never know if he could have. Snoke had given the order and he'd obeyed because pride means nothing against necessity.

"Billions _died_. You say you felt them! How... how can you call that irrelevant?" She's shifted towards him once again in her agitation and her eyes are desperate on his. His bones prickle with the knowledge that she still wants to absolve him of it, the worst excesses of the First Order. That even now, after everything, she still wants to believe in him, grasping at these straws. Even if she won't admit it to herself.

"There is no Dark, in the Force," he grits out. "There is no _Light_. There is only _power_. Everything lives, everything dies. People, planets, religions, governments; good things, bad things, everything, everywhere rises, rots and falls. The Light _kills_, scavenger. The Jedi were nothing if not willfully blind in their discipline. The Dark can nurture and protect and the Dark _doesn't lie to you_ about what it is. The Force is simply the will to shape and control everything around you."

"And that's what you're doing, isn't it? Like… like killing Snoke and taking over the First Order. Trying to control _all_ of it. So you can't be hurt anymore."

"You think I killed Snoke because I wanted to take _control?_"

She looks mutinous, her chin jerking up but she doesn't take it back.

He squeezes his hands and lets it crest only in his mind. He will not lash out. She is ignorant of so many things. He threw away everything in that room and she is a child.

She has that frown again between her eyebrows as if whatever she's feeling from him isn't what she expected

"Don't be simplistic," he finally manages. "But we're not talking about me, or _what hurts me_ as if you actually care about that. We're talking about the nature of the Force. You seem to believe that since Starkiller is gone, you've dealt some sort of crushing blow to the Dark side. The First Order is unhappy about it. Hux certainly wants Organa's head on a plate with Dameron's for an aperitif."

"And you don't?"

"Oh, I do. And I don't need a death planet to accomplish it. I can easily order a few Star Destroyers to any planet I choose to annihilate a continent or two. As intimidation it would be crude, yes, but still effective." She opens her mouth, angry and he growls, cutting her off. "The Force will scream and ripple with the loss and then it will. Move. On. Pebbles, scavenger. Oceans. Or in your case a handful of lost sand blowing in a desert of it."

"That doesn't make it _right!_" She jerks forward, her teeth bared, half rising up as if the next part of this is where she calls a saber to her and strikes him down. Although he's already down so it's not really going to take much of an effort on her side.

"No, it doesn't make it _right_, but that is _also_ beside the point. The Force is above us. Around us, below us, _inside us_ and it has no morality, no… no alignment." He flicks his fingers. It feels clumsy, without feeling. "It no more favors the Light than it does the Dark. What I am, what you are, is only different in how we shape it. What we use it for. The Force doesn't care how you connect to it and my way is _faster_."

She covers her face with both hands, hiding her expression and he can feel the scream building behind her teeth. His breath is fast and sharp and he growls again and deliberately shrugs hard with her eyes no longer on him. He's starting to lose track of the pain, subsuming it into what his blood wants which is to bury his teeth in her throat. He'll take it figuratively if that's all he can get.

It always comes to this.

"Annihilating whole planets is so wrong that I don't even know how I can begin to explain it to you," she finally says, so calmly that he knows she's a heartbeat from yelling. As if he couldn't tell from the roil in the Force.

"And how many do you think were on Starkiller?"

"Excuse me?" Her hands drop.

"Starkiller. Your Resistance destroyed it. How many did you kill?"

"I…" She compresses her lips. "I guess I have no idea."

"Millions, scavenger. _Millions_. Soldiers, yes, troopers and their officers, weapons experts, communication technicians. The people who built that machine and maintained its systems, kept it operational and on schedule which I know makes them casualties of war and somewhere you'll accept that. But they had families. There were children on Starkiller; there were schools, playgrounds, parks. People who ran the commissaries that kept everybody fed. Janitorial staff." She flinches at that for some reason. "Transportation, cargo runners, warehouse supervisors, garbage collectors, too many sub-systems to name. They died. And I _heard them too_. The Light. Kills. As many and as easily as the Dark."

"To prevent even more death!"

He sucks in a breath. She's just refusing to understand at this point. Why does he even try.

He stares into her eyes, so close and yet so maddeningly far.

"Fine, let's try this. Do you know why the Jedi forbade attachment?"

She flounders again with the conversational shift. "What? Kylo, what does _that_ have to do with anything? You're trying to justify the slaughter of whole planets somehow and now you want to talk about how the Jedi didn't… didn't like _kissing_?"

"Just answer me."

She throws up her hands. "Fine. I don't know that either! I don't know anything! Luke gave me exactly two lessons and neither of them mentioned anything about attachment."

"He did blow up the hut you were in when he saw us," he reminds her.

"When he saw you, you mean."

"Because I was touching _you_. He already tried to kill me once in a blind panic and trust me, he felt exactly the same thing when he saw us. Not me. _Us_." He swallows as both memories try to surge up at the same time, fighting for priority.

"And you blame him."

He hisses. "I blame him for everything. "

"That's not fair."

"I don't have to be fair. I stopped caring about fairness as a _child_." He hauls his attention back to the point of this whole pointless interaction. When is this link going to _break_? "So let me tell you once again, if you didn't get it straight from the last, great Jedi himself in his self imposed exile for every one of his many failures - the Jedi Code proscribes emotion. Seeing us together, feeling us? I could taste his fear. Didn't you?"

"He didn't want me to leave," she admits after a moment. He snorts. "He told me it wouldn't go like I thought it would."

That memory really wants back up now, clawing into him with black, black hands, and he shoves it down ruthlessly. He doesn't want to know how she wanted it to go. He doesn't want to remember how _he_ wanted it to go.

It happened. They're both still here. That's enough for now.

"No attachments, no love, no ties. The Jedi took their disciples as children for a reason. Did you know the Stormtrooper program is based on the Jedi teachings?"

"W..what?"

He nods with a sick sort of satisfaction. This is one thing that he is pleased to share with her, because it will choke her memory of Skywalker with even more thorns.

"Take them young, take them before they can remember anything. If they know nothing, they cannot question. They grow up believing in exactly what you tell them to believe in and then they go out and die for it. I really should have been handed over before I started to walk."

"_Kylo_. That's not _right_."

"You are very fond of that word. Along with _fair_. It works, that's why the Jedi did it. Even Anakin Skywalker, the strongest Jedi of his time, chosen by the Force itself, was considered too old when he was taken at nine because he'd already learned how to love people."

"Who's Anakin Skywalker?"

He didn't hear that right. "What?"

"You heard me."

Okay, so maybe he had heard her right. He stares and she just stares back. She really doesn't know. He thumps his head against the wall, relishing the hollow sound and the thrill of hurt it gives him back. That little? Did Luke tell her _nothing_? Although considering his own introduction to his bloodline perhaps he should have seen this coming. He'd scrub a hand over his face if raising his arm wouldn't make him scream. "Luke has so many things to answer for that even his kriffing ghost may never catch up."

"What," she spits at him, "does this Anakin Skywalker have to do with planetary annihilation?"

"Everything."

Her growl is small but there's no mistaking the look in her eye. "I have no idea how we got here at this point but if you don't start making some sort of sense, I swear I'm going to do something I will regret later."

It's on his tongue to spit back every other time she regretted something she's done with him but he holds it back by force of will. Another time. He inhales deep and and hisses out the grind of bone. His side throbs in sympathy for it but it helps.

"The Jedi," he begins carefully, picking out his words, "have a mantra. Do you know what it is?"

"I hate you." He narrows his eyes and she makes a sound of pure frustration. "The Force be with you? Okay. Then no." It seems she realizes suddenly that she's inched forward yet again during their argument and with a huff she settles back, sitting hard on one leg underneath her. The heightened color on her cheeks is apparent enough although this time it's anger and agitation.

He inhales the fact of how close they are, the spark in her eyes, the thread of her breath linking his heart to hers.

"You don't need all of it, but it starts 'there is no emotion, there is peace.'" He keeps his tone is as dry as the desert she came from. "The Jedi are forbidden to feel. Friendship is acceptable if you can manage it in moderation. Anathema to any strong emotion. Jealousy, lust. Pride, love, anger, although I don't know why I'm surprised Skywalker never got around to telling you that considering that he failed at upholding it so often. The central tenet of the Jedi faith is to care for nothing at all."

The frown that creases between her eyebrows is a kind of music. "Okay, skipping over the part where I have no idea why we're talking about this, that's just. Wrong. Really, just, wrong."

"Yes. But as I said, the Jedi were nothing if not dogmatic."

She chews on her lower lip, staring at him. At least she appears to be thinking about what he's just said for once. Her breathing is starting to steady, calming down which some part of him is pathetically pleased about. "Is that something he told you? That you were forbidden to… to love? To care?" Her voice is cautious. Her eyes flick away and then back.

He wonders if she hears the question on all the levels he does. Maybe. Or not. He doesn't care to presume anymore that he understands her either. Feels her, yes, oh, he feels her running through his veins like magma, but it's not as if that is the important thing.

He would touch her so gently, if she'd let him.

"In so many words, yes. Among so many other half truths and outright deceptions." He rummages cautiously through the words, trying to keep the worst of them tucked away in their boxes. "That feeling things is wrong. That feeling anything at all is _dangerous_. The Jedi Order is a celibate one. No lovers for you, little padawan."

She shifts and her chin lifts. "And of course you've had dozens because the Dark is all about _feeling_ things." There's something in her voice that wavers and her fingers tighten. He's not sure what that might mean, but some of him likes it. Maybe she doesn't like to think of other people touching him either.

"I was raised Jedi," he remarks softly enough. "I lived under those rules, or as many as I could tolerate. Untouched and untouchable. If not for the Code than for the fact that I was born a Skywalker and I broke things and sometimes people when I was upset. Cracked walls when I had nightmares — nobody wanted to be anywhere near me. The Light is a wasteland and Snoke's dedication to my training in the Dark did not include anything resembling comfort. Snoke rewarded me by letting me _sleep_."

If he looks at her now, will he see pity? Or indifference? Which would be better? Deprivation is necessary for strength, of anyone she would know this, and he certainly cannot miss what he has never had. He shakes his head, the taste in his mouth wanting to turn sour. "There were no attachments permitted other than to the Jedi Order, everything given over to the Force itself. The Jedi believed in control over themselves and that in reflection was supposed to give them control over everything else, I suppose." He can't help the sneer. "Which is the worst sort of lie."

She's quiet so long, staring at him, that he wonders if she's even going to reply. When she does, her voice is an ache, quiet enough that he barely catches it.

"Luke told me that the legacy of the Jedi was failure, you know."

His breath expels and he must have moved because he can't breathe for a hot heartbeat as something shifts deep inside. He makes an involuntary sound and she frowns.

"He _said_ that?" She nods, watching with a confused expression that begins to shift to a nebulous suspicion. He inhales once and then again even as he tries to project an ease he is nothing close to feeling. He's not sure how well it's coming across. "Well, at least he knew it before he died. If he'd had his way, we'd all have grown up droids."

"And what does _any_ of this have to do anything?"

"Anakin Skywalker," he enunciates carefully, "was a Jedi. Like me, he had no choice about it. Somewhere along the way he fell in love in defiance of the Jedi and he kept it a secret for years because his only other choice was banishment. He consummated that love against every stricture of the Code, while the Jedi, _peacekeepers of the galaxy_, promoted war within the Republic. When the Galactic Empire rose to supplant the rampant corruption, sweep it away, she was one of the first to die in the chaos and Anakin... went mad with grief. He swore to the Dark and spent the rest of his life serving it. He got his revenge, scavenger. He destroyed almost all of what was left of the Jedi."

"Sounds like your clone brother." He can tell she doesn't mean it, is simply deflecting the words so she doesn't have to think about them but the rage shoots through him like phosphorus, igniting in his veins.

The blood on the ground sticks to his fingers like tar. He's lunged forward in a single blink, shoving into her space, a hand on her wall to cage her in even as she throws herself back to get away although she can't, she can never get away from him and it doesn't matter because whatever hurts, he can make hurt _more_.

"The rest of the galaxy knows him as Darth _Vader_. You remember him. _The one I can't live up to_."

"_Ben!_"

"So tell me _this_, little scavenger." Her face is so close now, panicked. The twisting hurt is inside, is out, is an achingly distant shiver along every one of his bones. "If Darth Vader, Fist of the Empire, _my grandfather_, had been permitted to love, to do something as simple as hold her hand where it could be seen, how many people would that have saved? His vengeance lasted twenty years of slaughter. Alderaan would not have died and perhaps I would be the prince of a living world, instead of ruling over dust. He killed all but _one_ Jedi and _somehow_ that Jedi twisted him back from his purpose, back to the Light at the very last and the Empire _fell_ for it. And Luke _kriffing_ Skywalker went on to make yet more Jedi, to force their _useless_ Code on yet _more_ children and here we are, you and I, in the ashes of Hosnian and Starkiller and D'Qar and Crait. Billions dead because Anakin Skywalker _fell in love_."

He can see the scared white around her eyes as she stares up at him. She opens her mouth as if to reply, to say whatever she wants to say in this moment as if it's anything he could possibly want to hear and he throws his free hand up. She flinches at the harsh movement.

He clenches his fingers into a fist. He can smell his blood on the leather.

"Tell me again that _there is no emotion, there is peace_. Because you have no idea about any of this, as always, although you are so very _sure_ all the time that you are right, that you have been told the truth. That of course Starkiller was evil and had to be destroyed, when its very existence would have kept the Core worlds in line, so that I wouldn't have plan now to take them over one screaming planet at a time, enacting bloodbaths that you have yet to comprehend."

"Luke Skywalker, son of Vader, told you nothing. General Organa, daughter of Vader, tells you _nothing_. You are told to be Jedi because _of course_ that is what you must be. That there are no other options. That the Dark is bad and evil and misguided when the Force itself makes no distinction. Anakin Skywalker's betrayal came _from the Jedi_, by the very people who professed to love him most, _as did mine_. Their arrogance, their _willful_ shortsightedness, their utter determination to foster war in the heart of a corrupt Republic is why we're here now."

His breath is a furnace. She's pressed herself so far back into her corner that she's half welded herself to the metal. He feels like a penitent, scourged and bleeding and broken on one knee at her feet, crowding her there. He leans in as if to nuzzle her hair. He's close enough, he could.

"We're what's left, scavenger," he croons. "Just you and I. The central tenet of the Jedi faith is to stop caring, because it seems the cost of it is too high. Are you going to stop feeling? Tell yourself that you'll stop me too, however you have to do it? A saber through my heart? A knife in my side? Poison in your kiss, perhaps?" He's trembling with distant strain, torn muscle and bone struggling to meet the demands he's making. "You throw yourself into this war because somebody else told you that's what you were supposed to do. And I will kill all the Jedi. Even if that means you. _I will fix_ Anakin's mistake."

She stares up at him. He wonders what she sees. He is afraid of what she sees even as the world slides by. She licks her lip then, a flicker of pink.

It's like the dust in the air stops moving.

"Nobody... nobody is telling me to be anything I don't want to be. And maybe I don't understand things I should. But you? The Dark is _killing_ you. Kylo Ren. Benjamin Solo. No matter what you say." She licks her lips and then her gaze steadies, quiets. Calms. He's seen that on her face before as well and there is a sudden nameless dread wrapping around his heart for it. "No matter what terrible things they did to you. No matter how much they failed you and I know… you _know_ that I know they did. But they still… they still _tried_ and they _loved_ you and what you are doing now is _wrong_. Nothing you will ever say can justify the cruelty of the First Order. Maybe the Force doesn't care but you _know_ what you're doing is wrong. That the Dark is tearing you apart. It's eating you alive and _you know it._ "

The noise he makes seems to come from far away. He shakes his head once, twice to dislodge it. She leans forward in her advantage and now he's the one to flinch. They're so close.

"I am sorry for your grandfather." She swallows. Her voice is so quiet. "For the terrible things that must have happened to him. For the terrible things he did. For the terrible things… the terrible things that were done to you, that you do back."

He shakes his head again. "If they had left him alone, I might have… instead they fed me to the Light and not _one_ of them heard me screaming. You asked me and I am not... I am not my mother's enemy although sometimes I wake up in a panic, afraid that I am yours. Knowing that I have to be. You're going to try to bring them back and I can't let you do that, Rey. I can't. "

Her tears streak with colors in her darkness. He doesn't know which of them is shivering more. He tells himself it's because he's bleeding pain although he knows it's not. Tell himself it's because she's afraid.

"And you keep asking me why, as if having an answer is going to help you. I did not hate my father because killing him would have meant nothing if I had. The Dark eats pain. The Dark eats _sacrifice_. The Force cares more for Han Solo's death than it does for Hosnian's destruction because _I care that he died_. It ate five planets and the ripples settled within hours. Solo's death still echoes. I may never stop hearing it."

"Then _why?_ Why did you _do_ it?"

He hisses it out between his teeth, wishing he could shatter bone with it. He can feel her breath on his skin, more weakness that he has yet to carve away.

"Because Snoke told me to," he pulls up from somewhere, "and he was _right_. Because I loved my father and wanting him to love me back was a chain around my throat, trying to drag me down. Drag me back to your vaunted Light like a snarling animal at the end of a leash. The Light which tried to _murder me_. "

He pulls back and slams a fist into her wall before he even realises he's done it. The swell of sickening pain buries his mind, washes down and through his body in a tingle of ice. The breath he hauls in is edged with knives.

He glares at her. He had a point. He was trying to make a point.

"I _did it_ because what Solo wanted so desperately was to bring me back to _Leia_. He stood there and he told me he loved me, told me Snoke was using me as if I was a naive child and lost in the woods, when my master was giving me _purpose_. The strongest thought in his mind was that maybe, just _maybe_, my mother would finally forgive him if he just brought me back home. Like an _apology gift_. "

Her eyes are wide enough that he can see himself reflected.

"Would you like to know how _that_ felt, scavenger? Even there at the end, it wasn't just for me. He forgave me as he fell and I will _never_ forgive him for thinking of her first."

"_Ben._"

Her hand reaches out.

He throws himself back before she can make contact, unable to make it seem like anything but what it is. The sound he makes is more animal than human.

Her fingers are still outstretched. "Ben?"

He takes a breath. A second. A third, deep and jagged. He tries to shove all of it down again because if he has to keep feeling this, he's going to need to do damage to something outside himself and his only target is her.

"You are the only one," he finally manages, "that I will ever willingly suffer to touch me. That I will hear that name from. Whatever that means to you. Whatever that means to me. But if you touch me now, I will break your arm for it."

The crease between her eyebrows flares into existence and then oddly smooths out.

She moves forward so easily, a knee down between his sprawled legs so close that the heat of her sparks through the fabric. Her traitor hand is on his hip for balance a heartbeat later and then the fingers of her other hand are sliding along his jaw. They don't stop until they curl behind his ear and his hand flashes up much, much too late to do anything more than lock spasmodically over her wrist.

Her breath brushes across his face again and this time he is not the one in control.

"Do you know what I keep telling myself?" she says. Her eyes are flickering over his face and he feels his fingers tightening, staring to grind the delicate bones together under her skin.

"No."

"Yes. I keep telling myself no. I tell myself that you chose this. I tell myself that who you are is who you want to be. I tell myself to stop caring about what you feel, even as you force me to feel it too."

"Jedi." His heart twists at the confirmation. Skywalker has so much to answer for. He wants him dead again and again and _again_. "And do you?"

"Feel? You know I do."

"But you don't want to." He would snarl but nothing seems to want to work. He would laugh and it would too raw to be anything she'd want to hear.

"Don't tell me what I want. Don't you _dare_ think you can tell me who I am." Her thumb brushes the hinge of his jaw then and he turns his face away. "Why aren't you breaking my arm?"

He says nothing.

"Kylo Ren." Her fingers dig into his hair, shaking him slightly. "Why aren't you breaking my arm."

She leans into him harder, her grip tightening on his hip, fingertips digging into his scalp. He gasps involuntarily, caught between the two small sensations edged at the whirlpool of all the rest. He wonders if she's going to shake him again, what that is going to feel like, but then she makes an odd noise. She looks down.

He looks too.

She lifts her hand from the black cloth. His blood everywhere, wet and shining on her fingers, coating her in life. She's kneeling in it, staining her leggings.

His lips twist into a smile finally. It seems oddly fitting.

"Ben. Ben, you're hurt."

He drags his gaze up to hers, to the sudden comprehension so wide in her eyes.

It doesn't take much to lean forward, close the gap. A minor earthquake. A shiver of tsunami. Touches his lips to hers as softly as he can, barely anything at all.

Her hand tightens in his hair and her lips move in a shudder against his and he takes that with him as the bond dissolves and he's left alone.


End file.
